Author: Schütte, W.
Paper Title Page
WEPKS018 MstApp, a Rich Client Control Applications Framework at DESY 819
 
  • W. Schütte, K. Hinsch
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
 
  Funding: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
The control system for PETRA 3 [1] and its pre accelerators extensively use rich clients for the control room and the servers. Most of them are written with the help of a rich client Java framework: MstApp. They total to 106 different console and 158 individual server applications. MstApp takes care of many common control system application aspects beyond communication. MstApp provides a common look and feel: core menu items, a color scheme for standard states of hardware components and standardized screen sizes/locations. It interfaces our console application manager (CAM) and displays on demand our communication link diagnostics tools. MstApp supplies an accelerator context for each application; it handles printing, logging, resizing and unexpected application crashes. Due to our standardized deploy process MstApp applications know their individual developers and can even send them – on button press of the users - emails. Further a concept of different operation modes is implemented: view only, operating and expert use. Administration of the corresponding rights is done via web access of a database server. Initialization files on a web server are instantiated as JAVA objects with the help of the Java SE XMLEncoder. Data tables are read with the same mechanism. New MstApp applications can easily be created with in house wizards like the NewProjectWizard or the DeviceServerWizard. MstApp improves the operator experience, application developer productivity and delivered software quality.
[1] Reinhard Bacher, “Commissioning of the New Control System for the PETRA 3 Accelerator Complex at Desy”, Proceedings of ICALEPCS 2009, Kobe, Japan
 
poster icon Poster WEPKS018 [0.474 MB]  
 
THBHAUST04 jddd, a State-of-the-art Solution for Control Panel Development 1189
 
  • E. Sombrowski, A. Petrosyan, K. Rehlich, W. Schütte
    DESY, Hamburg, Germany
 
  Software for graphical user interfaces to control systems may be developed as a rich or thin client. The thin client approach has the advantage that anyone can create and modify control system panels without specific skills in software programming. The Java DOOCS Data Display, jddd, is based on the thin client interaction model. It provides "Include" components and address inheritance for the creation of generic displays. Wildcard operations and regular expression filters are used to customize the graphics content at runtime, e.g. in a "DynamicList" component the parameters have to be painted only once in edit mode and then are automatically displayed multiple times for all available instances in run mode. This paper will describe the benefits of using jddd for control panel design as an alternative to rich client development.  
slides icon Slides THBHAUST04 [0.687 MB]