COBIA training course at BASF

A training course was offered by CO-LaN on COBIA on the day before the start of the CAPE-OPEN 2018 Annual Meeting to allow participation to both events. Making use of the deliverables of COBIA Phase II, participants were able to create a Unit Operation relying on COBIA and to make use of it in a Process Modelling Environment.

The instructors for this course were Jasper van BATEN (AmsterCHEM) and Peter NELLEN.

The course covered:

• Why COBIA? (what is a middleware, what is COM, how to achieve efficient data handling between components, etc…)
• How COBIA differs from COM? (Unified Data Types, error handling, persistence, etc…)
• How to implement interfaces using COBIA? (Wizard, distributions available, COBIA command line code generator, etc…)
• How to benefit from COBIA more efficient data handling? (pre-allocated storage, COBIA means caller allocates, etc…)
• Roadmap for transition (phases of COBIA project, COM persistence versus COBIA persistence, etc…)

The course was kindly hosted by BASF and took place at BASF-Feierabendhaus in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Nine participants attended. The course material has been made available to the entire CO-LaN membership.

According to the evaluation subsequently made, all participants were quite satisfied to have signed for the course, finding the subject interesting and relevant. Exercizing COBIA was found useful even if the code typing involved proved a bit too much to some participants. They also expressed their views on COBIA and recognized its ease of use, especially when helped by the code generator or the Class Wizard. It is worth also mentioning that several participants have announced plans to make use of COBIA in future CAPE-OPEN software development, either to develop a component from scratch or to re-implement existing CAPE-OPEN layers.