TOOL: EXTRA
DEVELOPER TOOLS

For technicians involved in deploying the infrastructure and configuring it for a specific trial, the following extra components and functionalities are available:

• CIS and CSS adapters are available as open source software in the programming languages Java, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js, Python and as REST end-points. The enhance the regular Kafka connectors with trial-specific functionality, such as heartbeats, direct access to simulation time and message encoding. With these easy to adjust and implement adapters, software developers can quickly link up solutions, legacy systems and simulators to the CIS or CSS. These adapters come with standardized AVRO schemes for data exchange, which means the data exchange does not have to be designed and developed from scratch, but every trial can refer to what has already been developed before and can build upon this for its own use.
• The replay service enables sending out a chronological stack of messages (e.g. testing out a simulator feeding a solution). In addition, the Kafka topics UI is useful for inspecting the messages that were sent. Recorded messages can be downloaded in this UI and replayed.
• The infrastructure can be further enriched using several data services, such as the large file service for sharing large datasets between solutions, a WMS service for converting GeoJSON map overlays to the more common WMS format, a Twitter-gateway to convert messages to tweets, or a mail-gateway to convert messages to emails back-and-forth. A geofencing service is also available, that can trigger messages when a person or simulated entity enters or leaves an area.
• The test-bed technical infrastructure runs on the virtualisation platform Docker, which allows an IT technician to simply select the infrastructure components needed and quickly build one installer for the whole trial specific infrastructure. Several complete examples can be found here, or, alternatively, one can use the online composer. This infrastructure can then be easily deployed at your own organisation or inside an online cloud service (i.e. the whole infrastructure runs in the cloud and all connected components link to it via internet).