Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Kasemir, Kay" <[email protected]> · Fri, 14 Nov 2014 13:54:20 +0000

Hi:

Yes, there is the WebOPI, which builds the CSS BOY code based on Eclipse RAP, so it runs inside tomcat.

Advantages:
End user only needs a web browser.
We can re-use mostly the same CSS source code that's also in the RCP version of the opibuilder.
You can use the same *.opi files in either one.

Disadvantage:
Slow.
You're basically running CSS BOY inside tomcat, one instance per web user.
Instead of for example drawing a line on the screen, the web browser is using a long-poll for updates, and the web server then replies with JSON-type text like "operations": [ [ "beginPath" ], [ "rect", 0.0, 0.0, 1583.0, 695.0 ], [ "fill" ], [ "strokeStyle", [ 0, 0, 0, 255 ] ], [ "strokeText", "Whatever:", false, true, true, 0.0, 4.0 ], "

We find that quite practical for selected beam line displays. One or two beam line people plus the current beam line user can look at basic "is my experiment still running" type displays with a web browser. If that display needs to change because of certain needs in the current experiment, it's easy to edit that display in CSS on the beam line.
So it's good if very few people need to occasionally see specific displays, details of which can change.

But it's not practical for your site-wide status display where many people need to see the same thing all the time. For that, you better have something that for example creates periodic snapshots and serves those as images.

Thanks,
Kay

On Nov 13, 2014, at 7:36 PM, Paul Sichta <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
 wrote:

ditto.  Isn't this called webOPI?

-ps

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 7:16 PM, Ryan Pierce <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm curious about this myself. I had thought one could run CSS BOY pages inside apache / tomcat. But I haven't seen anyone suggest it in this thread. Am I mistaken about this?

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System