Component environments

Gateway Communication Driver has the following characteristics:

• The OI Engine is dynamically linked to the other Gateway Communication Driver components. In other words, a new OI Engine (feature enhancement or bug fix) would not require relinking to the other components nor re-QA of those other components. When deployed to the system, the new OI Engine would attach to all existing Gateway Communication Driver components.

• Newly deployed Plug-ins (feature enhancements or bug fixes) do not require relinking nor re-QA of associated components. Even new Plug-ins (for example, OPC Alarm & Events) would not require any development changes to the other components, and therefore no relinking in a customer- installed base. In fact, it is feasible to implement new functionality in a Plug-in to enhance Gateway Communication Driver without any involvement of the code of the other components.

• Gateway Communication Driver can be configured in one stand-alone configuration utility (OI Server Manager), and the OI Server Manager is capable of displaying specific configuration views for Gateway Communication Driver as well as other Communication Drivers. This utility allows the browsing and editing of Data Access products on different nodes.

• The OI Server Manager diagnostics tool displays generic diagnostic objects common to Gateway Communication Driver as well as all Communication Driver, in addition to Gateway Communication Driver-specific/developer-defined diagnostic data.

Gateway Communication Driver's data configuration format is XML. Any XML-enabled program (for example, XML Editor) can read this format.