One of our missions at Sparkflow is to share our knowledge and experience with other LabVIEW users. That’s why we’re always keen to take part in events like LabVIEW User Group Meetings at Silesian University of Technology and AGH. We gave presentation about code modularity, showing why modular code is necessary to keep the application architecture maintainable and expandable. Other presentations, gave by Maciej Antonik from National Instruments, included programming patterns – from state machines implementation to multithreaded architectures. There were also some examples of using LabVIEW Scripting.

Atendees had also had a chance to hear about new releases of LabVIEW NXG. Recently NI released version 2.1 of new generation environment. As of now we can use NXG to design our measurement system using System Designer module, which helps in hardware configuration. In the future this will replace Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX), providing unified project environment. Web Module is another recent release. It allows to develop WebVIs – the VIs ready to be published in the web. When creating such VI, LabVIEW automatically generates HTML and JavaScript code, which can be deployed on any web server. The server is also installed together with environment, so there is no need to build additional infrastructure for WebVIs development and testing. National Instruments is also investing in cloud-based solution named SystemLink, which allows to remotely manage and check the status of measurement systems.

It is worth noting that NXG development doesn’t stop “traditional” LabVIEW releases. Both environments will be released side by side for the next couple of years, until NXG will get functional parity with current-generation. However, it is possible to migrate the code to new environment using some of the tools available in NXG, though you should always consider pros and cons of that step. If you’re facing this decision or you’re not sure if LabVIEW NXG is suitable for your next project – don’t hesitate to contact us, we can help you make the right choice.