so far I used OpenHAB 1.7/1.8 + Z-Wave devices for over a year now and I’m very happy with it.
Lately, I noticed that HABmin gets hardly updated anymore for OH1 and also the Z-Wave Binding for OH1 seems to be stuck. I’d like to buy new devices but I fear that they aren’t supported, therefore I fear that I cannot use them. Also I have some bugs about node renaming that I would like to fix by an update.
OH2 right now seems to be quite ahead of OH1, at least when it comes to Z-Wave & HABmin, but OH2 is still beta only and the current state of OH1 addons (I need astro, weather, wake-on-lan, onkyo, samsung tv + some others) compatibility with OH2 is unclear to me.
The state of the cloudbees jenkins builds is also quite unclear. HABmin and Z-Wave has been moved out of OH1/OH2 Addons but are separate jobs, but it’s unclear which OpenHAB version they’re built for. As they’re triggered by OH2-Addons they seem to be targeted at OH2 only.
Searching in the forums or google brings a lot of topics where the discussion started in 2014, not really helpful. Also a state about OH2 brings up a blog post of @Kai based upon 2014, now nearly two years old aswell.
Is there any site where the current state of OH2 gets updated regularly? So far I’d like to try OH2 but not if I’d know that it will fail in first place because of compatibility issues with addons that I want to use or issues that may for sure appear.
So far everything I found out is that OH2 shouldn’t be used in a productive environment but that would also means that new Z-Wave devices can’t be bought and used.
Indeed, Habmin1 is end of life. All new development is taking place on Habmin2. It says so on the github page.
Assuming the new devices do not implement an unsupported command class (e.g. the Security command class) getting a new device supported in both OH1 or OH2 is a matter of updating the device database @chris has created and letting him know. He is very fast to get devices put into the binding database. So your fear is actually not going to be that much of a problem for the near future.
There is an openHAB 1 compatibility layer in OH 2 which lets any openHAB 1.x binding work in OH 2. There are also OH2 native versions of some of those bindings, some of which have more and some of which have less capability (e.g. Astro for OH 2 does not send events like it does in OH 1 so if you need events you need to implement that in rules or use the OH 1.x binding). Compatibility should not be a concern. You can simply continue to use the OH 1 bindings you are used to until the OH2 bindings get up speed.
I can’t really provide answers to this question in particular. They have rearranged the structure of the various GitHub projects but that doesn’t mean they are no longer being worked on or maintained. I don’t think Habmin has ever been part of the main openHAB repo (could be wrong and HABmin2 might have moved into the main project now). There are two independent versions of the Zwave binding, one in openHAB1-Addons and the other in openHAB2-Addond. I know chris has continued to develop and advance both, though suspect once OH2 goes to a full release at some point he will end-of-life the OH 1 binding (just a guess, I don’t want to speak for his plans).
Mainly on this forum. A lot of the core development for openHAB2 is actually taking place on the Eclipse Smart Home project so most of the active discussion is happening over there about bugs and new features and such. When there is a major change that impacts the behavior of OH or one of its surrounding addons or other tools there is a posting here in this forum.
As I said, both of the zwave bindings are continually being updated and adding support for new hardware is just a matter of updating a database. Just yesterday I saw some postings that resulted in a couple of new zwave devices being added to both bindings. You will not be stuck only using old hardware.
All that being said:
Most of what you are afraid of with OH 1 are non-issues in the short run. The bindings are undergoing continued development, new devices are continually being added to the zwave database to support new devices.
Also most of what you are afraid of with OH 2 are non-issues. OH2 is pretty solid now and its native bindings are pretty capable and solid. There are a number of known bugs that are being worked and a few new features that are also in work (e.g. the reason the Astro binding for OH 2 no longer supports sending events is they are implementing a new feature into the core to handle that). So your mileage may vary.
If an OH2 native binding doesn’t exist or doesn’t support a feature you need that the OH 1 does, you can still use the OH 1 bindings. In fact, you can just move your entire setup over to OH2 almost as is and it should work.
The primary reason people (myself included) say that it isn’t ready for prime time is because of the known bugs and still planned for features. But for most people OH 2 is very solid and capable and many people find it perfectly stable.
These repositories are for OH2 - they haven’t been moved out of the OH1 repository, so if you want the OH1 ZWave binding, it’s still in the OH1 repository.
However, unless you are planning to develop, this doesn’t matter since the OH distribution builds will pull in these bindings in exactly the same way as if they were in the same repository. In fact the OH2 distribution is made up of other repositories as well (eg the ESH stable build) - you don’t need to worry about this unless you want to develop the code.
I’m trying to avoid major changes in the OH1 binding. I continue to support bugs, and database additions are updated routinely, but I don’t really want to add any new major features to the OH1 code and the majority of development and new features is going into the OH2 codebase. I’ll likely continue to update the database for OH1 while there’s people wanting to use it as it is exported from the online database anyway.
Eclipse SmartHome is the foundation of OH2. Much of which went into ESH came from the developers and lessons learned from the development of OH1. This drawing may be helpful to understand as it shows how different major parts of the architecture support each other:
ESH is a framework. It is actually derived from openHAB1, but moved under the Eclipse Foundation. It provides the core framework for a smarthome system, and is therefore core of OH2.
Most of the core functionality of OH2 is actually part of ESH (rules, sitemaps, items, REST interface…).
OH2 is then an implementation of ESH. It selects specific services, and customises the framework as OH2. It adds a LOT more bindings which can not be part of ESH due to ESH licensing constraints.
