Watch or rewatch: “Going against Darren’s advice: Being successful with PPLs as shared components” [GDevCon]

In the presentation, Jens Christian takes a deep dive into modular software development with LabVIEW by using Packed Project Libraries (PPLs) as standalone software components. He covers topics such as:

• The lifecycle of a software component, including versioning, independencies, and dependencies
• The benefits of and differences between shared components and plugins
• What you need from a software component in the development and runtime environments, respectively
• Why PPLs are an attractive choice for shared components and plugins—and why they can be difficult to use

Software components in the form of reusable libraries have been distributed as VI Packages for years. VI Package Manager lets you install such reusable code in your development environment, which in turn allows LabVIEW Application Builder to include it in your built applications. However, shared components and plugins must be built independently of your application, and they must be distributed with NI Package Manager.

In the presentation, Jens Christian explains how PPLs can be used, how PPLs can easily be made dependent on each other, and how you can use the same component both in the development environment while building your application and in the runtime environment when running your application.

In addition, he also demonstrates how NI Package Manager or other tools can be used to install the PPLs. He also covers building palettes to make the PPLs’ public APIs available in LabVIEW.