An Overview of System Objects in Application Server

Following up on a previous post, A Quick Overview of Automation Objects in Application Server, let's take a closer look at the System Objects.

As I indicated before, I consider the System Objects the infrastructure objects of the Galaxy (remember, Galaxy = project). These objects provide the pillars or foundation of your application, and define two important concepts in your project Galaxy: The Plant Model and the Deployment Model.

At present, Application Server provides five System Objects out of the box:

• WinPlatform: This object represents each computer that is part of your system. Each object server, each operator station, the Historian Server node, they are all represented by this object. It gathers and calculate information about the computer node itself; from RAM and disk space available to CPU load and page faults. It is also the basis of the Deployment Model.
• AppEngine: I call it the runtime engine, but refer to it as 'the boss' out of respect for its job. It's in charge of executing Areas, Device Integration Objects, and Application Objects; it pretty much runs the show. One of the most important settings in this object is the scan period, or 'how fast do you want your application to run'. This baby can scan as fast as 10ms all the way up to 1 hour; hardware permitting, of course. Do you want different parts of your application to run at different speeds? No problem! You can have multiple AppEngines in the same computer and/or across multiple computers running different parts of your Galaxy at different speeds. I'm adding another line to its description to make sure that its importance its highlighted by the length of its descriptive paragraph. << That was the line.
• Area: One of the most simple objects, but follows the AppEngine in importance. It's job it's two-fold: on one side it represents the physical layout of the plant, allowing you to organize the rest of your objects; on the other side it represents how alarms are distributed in the Galaxy. Both are usually related; for example, if the production area has two production lines (also modeled by the Area object), the operator for Line 1 will only want to see alarms for that area, while the Production Supervisor might want to see alarms for both lines. It is the basis of the Plant Model.
• InTouchViewApp: Holds the operator's graphical interface. This is your visualization application, it includes the windows and ArchestrA Graphics that comprise your operator interface. It is fully integrated with the Galaxy's security infrastructure.
• ViewEngine: Another engine object but much more basic than the AppEngine. It's only purpose is to allow you to distribute your visualization applications (InTouchViewApp objects) to the operator stations.

If you want to know a little bit more about the AppEngine's scan rate and the execution of the objects, let know in the comments.