GCentral

GCentral.org

Frequently Asked Questions

How Do I Get To GCentral?

Go to GCentral.org

What Is GCentral.org?

GCentral.org is

a non profit organization (incorporated September 2019) composed of G community leaders creating a platform for programmers to find/use, contribute, and co-develop G code packages and collaboration resources.

GCentral is leading the charge to reduce the friction in collaboration felt by the G programmer community, and will align its efforts with the community's needs.

Is GCentral just an aggregation of repos?

In addition to solving other problems, GCentral solves the problem of G programmers attempting to find an use each other's code. GCentral provides a single web interface that indexes the common repositories of all three package managers to present packages of all types through a single interface.

Why is the G programmer community not using a single repository?

Our community has a long history, members with different preferences/use cases, and members with varying awareness of community resource locations. This has led to different methods of package/code distribution as well as different package manager technologies.

Here are the major locations of code today: 1. ni.com community forums as attachments 2. lavag.org as attachments 3. The NI Tools Network 4. JKI Package Network 5. NI Tools Network 6. GPackage.io 7. Git Repos

Each of the above have various advantages, disadvantages, and capabilities. NI.com NI.com has been around the longest and has the infrastructure investment of National Instruments. The NI.com allows users to easily post files, code snippets, .llbs, .ppls, vips, nipkgs, etc. Many users are first acquainted with the NI community through ni.com

ni.com allows you to attach files and is probably the most popular community site. So when the VI Package manager arrived, people who didn't want to go through the validation process of the LabVIEW Tools Network simply attached packages to ni.com forum posts. Oh yeah... there's the NI Tools network: a repository of code validated and certified by NI. The Tools Network is in the VI Package format. Then there is the JKI Tools Network (also VI Package format), which is publicly readable but not publicly writable. We also have lavag.org, which is another community forum that allows users to attach files suck as VI packages. The LabVIEW Tools Network

in the early 2010's NI introduced a new package manager for a variety of reasons. There is no public repository of NI Packages, but NI Package Manager exposes the products and packages created by NI. NI Package manager also allows someone to create their own private repository

There are different preferences and experience levels of our community. So some people aren't aware of lavag.org and have posted all of their code on

GCentral

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is GCentral?

GCentral is for programmers who need to find, share or collaborate on G reusable code or software engineering tools. GCentral is a non profit organization that provides a platform for G code packages and collaboration resources.

What problems is GCentral solving?

G community members are often frustrated when looking for tools and code others have posted on the web. There are too many places to look, and most aren’t easy to find:

• ni.com
• lavag.org
• LabVIEW Tools Network
• NI package manager
• VI Package Manager
• G package manager
• Git repos
• Others

These locations often don’t reference each other. Therefore, a new or even experienced G community member can easily miss code ALREADY WRITTEN that solves their problem, resulting in wasted time duplicating code.

Furthermore, should someone want to generously contribute their code, there are significant barriers to build and distribution.

How does GCentral solve these problems?

GCentral exposes packages of all types (NIPkgs, VIPkgs, GPkgs) through a single web interface. The web interface indexes the main locations of packages.

GCentral provides software tools to build and move packages to the common locations making it easy to contribute code, and find and use each other's code.

Ultimately code that's easy to find reduces/eliminates wasted time in re-solving problems, and redirects the community's effort towards new and meaningful innovations.

History

• GCentral was first envisioned by Chris_Cilino_(LabVIEW_Champion) in early 2019.
• Officially incorporated as a Non-Profit, September 18, 2019.

Organization

GCentral is organized as a non-profit with a Board of Directors, Executive Staff, and a Steering Committee. These positions are currently held as follows:

Board of Directors

• Quentin Alldredge
• Fabiola De la Cueva
• Danielle Jobe

Executive Staff

• Chris Cilino, Founder and President
• Open Position, Secretary
• Open Position, Accountant
• Open Position, Bookkeeper
• Open Position, Public Relations

Steering Committee

• Michael Aivaliotis
• Brian Hoover
• Jeff Kodosky
• Jon McBee
• Brian Powell
• Michal Radziwon
• Derek Trepanier

Volunteers

Volunteers have been essential in getting GCentral's mission going. This is above the volunteered time of our Board, Staff, and Committee. A few others have volunteered time and effort and have helped in getting a prototype website together. They include:

• Matthias Baudot, Studio Bods
• Siva Shankar, Soliton