Challenge
Whether it is tracing luggage in the airport conveyor system, controlling the
operation of the oil refinery, or producing your favorite soft drink — modern
industry relies heavily on the ability to obtain, monitor, and control data of
their devices and processes.
To address this need, Inductive Automation has developed Ignition — an
innovative industrial control software for the supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) space.
In a conservative and strictly regulated industrial environment, the Inductive
Automation developers searched for a way to provide their clients with a way to
collect, store, and display their data in a meaningful and manageable way.
The team decided to go for the web-based approach to modernize the user
interfaces of their platform. This posed the challenge of ensuring compatibility
with the older software industrial control used by many companies.
Solution
Inductive Automation chose JxBrowser as a way to display web components in a
Swing-based implementation and to render the complete user interface in the
JavaFX version of their application’s client runtime.
This allowed the team to enhance the Ignition with an ability to provide the
client data on visually complex customizable screens.
The integration also ensured a way to provide the platform’s users with access
to the operating system functionalities, such as authentication and sensor
integration, through interaction between the JavaFX application and native
layers using WebSocket communication. Which facilitated compliance with industry
standards and security requirements.
Results
The hybrid solution developed by Inductive Automation became a significant
landmark in the industry, bridging the gap between traditionally used software
and cutting-edge visual data representation.
Modern web-based interfaces helped Ignition stand out among conventional
offerings, planting the company’s flag on the future for supervisory control and
data acquisition software, which has a user interface.
