Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

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