Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]> · Fri, 14 Oct 2005 13:26:19 -0400

On Oct 14, 2005, at 13:02 , Steve Lewis wrote:

However, I have been a little concerned when it appears the the V4

effort is getting too Java-centric, or otherwise "picking winners".

We used to require: SunOS, VME, VxWorks, X11; yes they were the

"easy" choices. Now, we are happy to be free of all but one of

them. Let's not fall into the same trap. (We almost did with C++).

I think the Java enthusiasm is limited to the GUI client side,
with which I would very much agree.

Once upon a time, I was very interested in anything graphical.
These days I'd rather avoid working on anything with a GUI,
because how do you implement and maintain it?
Some variant of C with MFC, Cocoa, Motif, Qt, GTK, vxWindows,
or your own abstraction layer?
Some web technology like CGI, JSP, ....
so that the 'user' uses a web browser?
Java, which only opens another can of worms:
JSP or 'rich client' with AWT, Swing, SWT, ...?

Nevertheless, the experience of separating the archiver
into a C/C++ engine & data server with Java GUI,
using the network protocol as the interface
and otherwise working on engine and GUI in parallel
has been quite good.

See http://gumtree.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I did not know about Gumtree. It even has an (empty) EPICS link.

Looks pretty interesting--why are we not just using/enhancing that?

I only learned about it at the EPICS/TANGO Eclipse workshop,
and it convinced me for the first time that Matthias' idea of building
applications based on Eclipse could actually work ;-)
I still find it hard to believe that Gumtree can live up to all the
promises, I don't even know what all those promises are,
and the web site is indeed partially broken/empty.
I did see the live EPICS demo: browse records, see live updates.

I like the basic idea of using Eclipse as a framework for
windows, menus, online help, preferences, online updates, ...
better than starting yet another framework like the SNS XAL
framework which will only cause other sites to say
"not developed here".

Plans that were mentioned at the Eclipse workshop:
- Use Gumtree as the basis for our new applications.
- Agree on interfaces, so that e.g. a data plotting
  plugin for Eclipse can be used in both Gumtree
  and 'our' application framework.
- Merge Gumtree with 'EPICS Office'

Likewise, we could try to build a "Control System Application Suite".

Well, there's the rub, EPICS has thrived because its best and

worst feature are the same: there is no "we".

Hmmm. So what do you suggest we do?

-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System