Recently, National Instruments has been vocal about wanting to provide better support for third-party LabVIEW add-ons. A huge demonstration of this commitment, recently, was allowing JKI to integrate VI Tester into the LabVIEW project environment. In fact, it might seem surprising or even foolish for NI to do this, considering that it just released a competing product, the NI LabVIEW Unit Test Framework Toolkit. But, if you look deeper, you’ll see that NI’s support of a competing third-party add-on for LabVIEW is a very smart, mature, and strategic move.
For a long time, I have had concerns about whether NI would be able to nurture a viable market and ecosystem for third-party add-ons for LabVIEW, because of the fact that NI sells its own add-ons for LabVIEW. This creates a huge, short-term incentive for NI to compete directly against third-parties (like JKI).
But also, NI has a huge incentive to encourage third parties to innovate on its platform. The more tools and solutions that exist on the LabVIEW platform to help users efficiently create working systems, the better it is for NI. If NI were to compete aggressively against third-party LabVIEW add-on providers, it would starve the ecosystem and send third-parties running for the hills. Small companies simply cannot compete against NI head-to-head.
At JKI, we are very excited about LabVIEW becoming an even more powerful, open platform for 3rd party tools. As you might know, we love to create toolkits for LabVIEW, and our flagship product, VI Package Manager, is a powerful tool for packaging, distributing, and installing add-ons for LabVIEW. We hope that NI continues to open up LabVIEW and we’ll try hard to provide them with both our feedback and support. And, of course we’ll work hard to create more great add-ons for LabVIEW.
Happy to help Jim! Any tools that help our users benefits NI.
I regularly use OpenG VIs in LabVIEW applications I write for myself, which has me hooked on VIPM.
Ok, this is good news.
But how good?
Is the platform really open?, I mean can anyone connect their code to a toolbar?
What I would really, really love is a possibility to do programmatic builds.
LabVIEW 8.2 opened the new builder a little bit by exposing the build properties via some vi.lib VIs, unfortunately the loop is closed again in 8.6 where the info is stored in ABAPI classes with no API.
Ton
Eli: Thanks for the nice note. I’m happy to hear that you’re hooked on VIPM. Make sure to add a VI Package Configuration to your project, so that you’ll always know which versions of the OpenG VIs you’re using
Ton: Thanks for the feedback. You’re right that there’s a lot more that can be done to open up LabVIEW to everyone. JKI is working very hard to help NI make this a reality. Programmatic builds of LabVIEW applications is another area that can definitely be improved. You can be sure that JKI will be advocating improvements in that area.
Thanks Jim for the comments. JKI’s efforts in building add-ons to LabVIEW add tremendous value to the platform and we commend your efforts.
Ton – I am the guy at NI working on this. I’d love to hear your feedback and bring you into the conversation. Please shoot me an email: jeff.meisel (at) ni.com