BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
Accessing database resources from Accelerator Controls servers or applications with JDBC/ODBC and other dedicated programming interfaces have been common for many years. However, availability and performance limitations of these technologies were obvious as rich web and mobile communication technologies became more mainstream. HTTP REST services have become a more reliable and common way for easy accessibility for most types of data resources, include databases. Several commercial database REST services have become available in recent years, each with their own pros and cons. This paper presents a way for setting up a generic HTTP REST database service with technology that combines the advantages of application servers (such as Glassfish), JDBC drivers, and Java technology to make major RDBMS systems easy to access and handle data in a secure way. This allows database clients to retrieve data (user data or meta data) in standard formats such as XML or JSON.
BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York, USA
In keeping with a long tradition in the BNL Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) controls environment, we try to provide general and simple to use interfaces to the users of the controls. In the past we have built command line tools, Java tools, and C++ tools that allow users to easily access live and historical controls data. With more demand for access through other interfaces, we recently built a set of python and MATLAB modules to simplify access to control system data. This is possible, and made relatively easy, with the development of HTTP service interfaces to the controls*. While this paper focuses on the python and MATLAB tools built on top of the HTTP services, this work demonstrates clearly how the HTTP service paradigm frees the developer from having to work from any particular operating system or develop using any particular development tool.
* T. D'Ottavio, et al., these proceedings