Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Dirk Zimoch <[email protected]> · Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:45:18 +0100

PSI is working on QT, too.

Anton Mezger has written a .adl to .ui converter and a prototype medm

replacement with most medm widgets re-implemented in QT. He will present

his work at the collaboration meeting in April.

We also have development running on a broader scope. Jan Chrin's "CAFE"

(Channel Access interFacE) implements Corba-like features on top of CA

and provides a simple to use C++ interface that can be used for writing

CA clients. He has a QT widget set which is quite network protocol

agnostic. At the moment it can connect to CAFE and it is planned to

extend it to EPICS 4 soon. These Qt widgets does not try to mimic medm

but has additional features (e.g. showing units, improved alarm color

coding, etc.)

Dirk

Andrew Johnson wrote:

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

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System