Welcome to the home page for the Agile Control Forum. Read the AcfAnnouncement if you didn't see it before arriving here.
The Agile Control Forum (ACF) is being set up to encourage and facilitate the spread of "agile" technologies, including methods and tools, in the control and automation software industry. This thread in the comp.lang.python group on Usenet precipitated ACF's inception. While Engenuity Corporation and Phaseit sponsor ACF, they stake no claim of ownership to the material contained herein. Please get involved, helping define the purpose and future of the group, and advancing the state of the art in control and automation software. We also look forward to those "on the other side"--the vendors and end-users of industrial automation--eventually joining us here, if only to read about the superior results "agility" makes possible.
Please join the general discussion mailing list. Posts are unmoderated, but you must subscribe in order to post or view the list archives.
Ideas for some initial pages or page categories:
ControlRecipes: code snippets and solutions for various problems in control and automation (intended to be very small self-contained examples... think "recipe" from cooking)
TechnicalPapers: links to various papers on issues in control, using agile technologies for industrial or laboratory automation, advantages of Python, Perl, Tcl, and other dynamic/scripting languages, etc.
AcfLicense: the license or copyright terms or whatever, under which any information submitted to this web site or the mailing list is implicitly covered
OpenSourceProjects: links to Open Source projects related to control and automation
AgileCompensation: how to structure the business side of a project to compensate everyone fairly, yet in an agile fashion.
TaxImplicationsInCanada If you dutifully write a re-useable software module, do you then have to charge PST on that module?
LanguageComparisons?: just a thought... we don't need wars around here, but healthy discussion and comparison of the benefits of different languages in the control field can only be educational and productive. How about "model" examples of various control tasks (e.g. waiting for a command on a serial port) written side-by-side in several "agile" languages?
"WarStories?", especially narratives with enough specific, technical content to illustrate the differences between standard industry practices and the superior opportunities that motivated the sponsors to found ACF
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