Watch og Re-watch: “Going against Darren’s advice: Being successful with PPLs as shared components” [GDevCon]

In this presentation, Jens Christian delves into modular software development with LabVIEW by using packed project libraries (PPLs) as standalone software components. He will, among others, touch on several important topics, especially:

• The life of a software component: Version, independence, and dependencies
• The benefits of, and differences between, shared components and plugins
• Differences between what you need from a software component in the
development environment and in your application’s runtime environment
• Why PPLs are a tempting choice for shared components and plugins, and why they can be difficult to use

Software components in the form of reuse libraries have been distributed as VI Packages for years. VI Packages Manager lets you install such reuse code into your development environment, which in turn lets the LabVIEW Application Builder include it within your built applications. But 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 tells about how PPLs can be used for this, how PPLs can easily be made to depend on each other, and how you can go about using the same component both in the development environment while you build your application, and in the runtime environment when you run your application. 

In addition, he demonstrates how NI Package Manager can be used. Also,  how to install some additional tools the PPLs, including building palettes to make your PPLs’ public APIs accessible in the LabVIEW development environment.