flexmeasures VS edn

Hi,

this is for everybody who is interested in clean tech, especially real-time automation within new energy systems.

We've been working on FlexMeasures for a while ― an energy management system (EMS) with a focus on using demand flexibility to its maximum potential.

We're running it in several pilots ourselves, but our aim is to speed up the energy transition across the world. Let's not re-invent the wheel (i.e. a software stack around time series and optimization) too many times. Wherever you are in the world, and whatever setting you might be looking at (energy-modern housing in the U.S., smart e-mobility in Africa, self-balancing microgrids in Indonesia, etc.), maybe some of you will like our approach.

We've decided that making it easy and clear for developers to build such energy solutions can bring the largest gains. The first step towards that goal was a permissive license (Apache 2.0). The latest step we took was a Docker image (we got a Docker-based tutorial here: https://flexmeasures.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tut/toy-exampl...).

You can see the code at https://github.com/FlexMeasures/flexmeasures

Since recently, FlexMeasures is a project within the Linux Energy Foundation (https://www.lfenergy.org/projects/flexmeasures/), which helps to establish a proper governance and quality standard.

Actually, upcoming Thursday is our next Technical Steering Committee meeting, and interested people are warmly invited:

Thursday, June 16 at 8:00 am US Pacific Time / 11:00 am US Eastern

I work on one building block of climate tech ― energy demand flexibility software. Useful in all kinds of settings, like industry or microgrids.

The collaborative aspect is that [our platform](https://github.com/FlexMeasures/flexmeasures) is open source, under a permissive license.

I'm trying to grow a startup on top of it, but the whole idea of doing impactful work is that it's being used to speed up the energy transition everywhere. Less re-inventing the wheel. If you are involved in any projects where energy demand flexibility should be unearthed, please consider using FlexMeasures ― with us or without us. Happy to chat.

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...