Plugins are optional components that extend YARP functionalities. More...

Collaboration diagram for Yarp Plugins:

Modules
	Add a plugin to YARP

	Ways to compile YARP plugins
	For examples in this section, we assume a Linux environment.

Detailed Description

Plugins are optional components that extend YARP functionalities.

There are three main types of plugins in YARP:

Devices are plugins dedicated to the management of hardware or logical components through a standardized interface. For example, a YARP device can read data from a sensor and publish data over a yarp port.

Carriers are plugins dedicated to implement a specific network transportation protocol, for example TCP,UDP, etc

Portmonitors are plugins able to modify data over the network transmission, implementing compressions, filtering, synchronization or data reordering.

Plugins can be compiled either dynamically or statically. If a plugin is compiled dynamically, the result of the compilation will be a shared object (.so in linux) or dynamically-linked library (.dll in windows) which will be loaded runtime. If a plugin is compiled statically, the result of the compilation will be a static library (.a in linux, .lib in windows) which needs to be linked by the executable that will use it. By default, the preferred choice in YARP is dynamic linking. This choice maintains small the size of the executable while individual components can be rebuilt without relinking the main application. However, if the OS/architecture does not supports dynamic linking (such as embedded systems) than it is possible to build plugins statically by setting the CMake option BUILD_SHARED_LIBS to false.

More details are discussed in: Ways to compile YARP plugins

Modules

Detailed Description