Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Rhyder <[email protected]> · Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:00:53 +1100

Hi Andrew

I am very interested in seeing the wider EPICS community take a coordinated approach to the development of Qt based tools, and I hope we would be able to make a useful contribution to any collaboration.

At the Australian Synchrotron we are trying to ensure we have a well chosen set of modern GUI solutions, both for new developments and for replacement of outdated technologies. Qt (along with the EPICS framework we have developed) is of particular interest for many reasons including the capacity for basic GUI construction using drag/drop with the flexibility of additional application specific functionality through coding and scripting when required.

Regards
Andrew Rhyder
Australian Synchrotron

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andrew Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, 22 February 2012 8:42 AM
To: EPICS tech-talk
Subject: QT-based tools: Expressions of interest requested

Control System Studio (CSS) is now 5+ years old and has an excellent and rich 
selection of tools for creating GUIs and other programs for interacting with 
an EPICS control system. However (there's always a "but" after that kind of 
introduction isn't there!) there are sites, systems, programs, places and 
people for which Java, Eclipse and/or SWT are not seen as a suitable 
environment. This message are not in any way trying to replace or denigrate 
CSS, it's about providing an alternative where CSS is not appropriate.

This is a call for expressions of interest in a collaboration to develop tools 
and technologies based on the QT toolkit. A number of EPICS users have spoken 
about QT (pronounced "cute")as the most obvious replacement for the X11 and 
Motif tool-kits used by the old extensions MEDM, EDM, EDD/DM, dm2k, ALH, 
StripTool, Probe, Burt, etc. A number of QT-based projects have already been 
developed at various sites. If your lab/site/application has GUI needs which 
can't be fulfilled using CSS and you are interested in working together using 
QT, please respond to this email with what your needs and interests are, and 
what resources you might be able to contribute.

I hope to moderate a discussion on this "QT Initiative" at the EPICS meeting 
at SLAC in April; all interested parties welcome.

The APS has a long-term need to replace the Motif-based programs MEDM, ALH and 
StripTool, which are heavily used by the operators in our control room and by 
other staff around the site. John Hammonds and various others have developed 
the ADL-to-BOY converter for CSS which is currently in use at one of the APS 
beamlines, but we don't believe that all of our current users will be willing 
or able to run CSS. We have a developer in our group who has fairly extensive 
QT experience, and are particularly interested in the EPICS QT work that has 
been developed at the Australian Synchrotron.

- Andrew
-- 
Optimization is the process of taking something that works and
replacing it with something that almost works, but costs less.
-- Roger Needham
<br>This message and any attachments may contain proprietary or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient or you received the message in error, you must not use, copy or distribute the message. Please notify the sender immediately and destroy the original message. Thank you.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System