CanXL CanOpen and Panama

[RabbitHareLu]

First of all, thank you very much for open-sourcing this library for support of Canbus, and for actively maintaining javacan.

I would like to know if there are any plans for future support of CanXL and CanOpen?

Also, I have seen discussions about panama in other issues. Is a refactoring based on panama on the agenda?

[pschichtel]

hi @RabbitHareLu. I've just converted this into a discussion because it seems more fitting. I've also created #83 for CAN XL specifically.

I would like to know if there are any plans for future support of CanXL and CanOpen?

CAN XL is on my radar given that it is somewhat actively being worked on in the kernel and Oliver Hartkopp is also working on ISOTP over CAN XL out of tree.

Regarding CANopen: There is the module of PLC4X for it that's based on JavaCAN I think mostly implemented by @splatch. Given that CANopen is mostly a higher level protocol it seems to be reasonable to have it built on top of JavaCAN, leaving JavaCAN to focus on the low-level stuff. I wouldn't be opposed to adding it as a module.

Also, I have seen discussions about panama in other issues. Is a refactoring based on panama on the agenda?

I do have some ideas floating around for a potential refactor of the JavaCAN interfaces that would allow to support JNI and Panama and potentially even other transports (CAN over serial and stuff like that). That would involve breaking changes and is thus labelled javacan-4. I have looked at panama in the past, but since it has not been stable back then (and barely is these days), the tooling was kind of a mess.

For all of these topics: I haven't noticed strong demand for any of these so far and I don't personally have any need for it or even any hardware to test it. There have been some requests for non-socketcan support (e.g. CAN over serial) which would require the same architecture changes as panama support.

I'm generally open to sponsored development and I would also assist in PRs if contributing the functionality is of interest (BCM and J1939 have been contributed externally for example).