Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:15:53 -0500

I think that depends on the application.  EZCA is used extensively at the APS and elsewhere for interfaces to scripting languages like IDL and Visual Basic that do not support C-style callbacks.  I depend on it a lot for IDL, and it quite robust.  There is no development being done on it, but it seems to be pretty bug-free.

If you want your application to use callbacks then you cannot use EZCA.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Lecorche Eric
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 8:05 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc: gillette
Subject: Use of Easy CA ?

Hi,

We are presently considering the use of the Easy CA interface for future 
needs. A first but very simple test works fine and was quickly performed 
but we are quite frightened by the warnings within the Epics Web site  :

"In practice though if you have problems getting code to work that uses 
EZCA or if you get unexplained failures or crashes, you will get less 
help from the EPICS community in debugging the issue than you will if 
you use the native CA API. The CA API is not hard to use, and EZCA is 
not maintained as aggressively as the underlying CA library."

So before going further, we would like to know your experience and 
feeling when considering the use of the E-Z CA interface not only for 
small tests but for bigger developments having to be reliable and to be 
used for many years. What would you advice us to do : use the simple E-Z 
CA package or prefer the more complex (but better maintained ?) Channel 
Access library ?

Thanks a lot for any comment

Eric Lécorché

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System