MMI Prototyping Efforts

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MMI Prototyping Efforts
Jlab, LANL, ANL September 5, 1997
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Motif - under Windows NT and UNIX

• Probe was built by APS
• EDD/DM was built on exceed by Hathaway - but not
  tied to a WNT CA Client
• EDD/DM will be built native to NT and tied to the
  CA Client on NT as a fallback
• Long range issues
• Is the required work to incorporate the new
  requirements prohibitive?
• Is this really the technology to build on

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Native Packages Under NT

• VISIX -
• runs under UNIX and WNT -
• no performance numbers
• used for alarm handler and archiver at Hathaway
• Visual C
• Great performance and development environment
• Prototype connected to channel access on WNT
• Does not run under UNIX
• Active X
• Great performance and development environment
• Prototype connected to channel access on WNT
• Does not run under UNIX

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Commercial Packages

• All have nice graphical objects
• All have been integrated with channel access
• NI - Lookout
• Does not run under UNIX
• Queued updates die at 1,500 per second on a
  133MHz Pentium
• Dataviews
• Operational under UNIX and WNT?
• Cost? Performance?
• SAMMI
• Operational under UNIX
• Limited performance
• SL-GMS
• Operational under UNIX and WNT?
• Performance? Cost?

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JAVA - performance

• Performance measurements done on primitive
  objects is adequate
• polygons and lines on a 133MHz Pentium write at
  over 10K / second
• text at over 1K words per second
• Performance of a component was at 500 per second
• component consisted 3 lines, a circle, and text
• a single text update
• Currently measuring the performance of JAVA Beans

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JAVA - features

• JAVA is demonstrated portable between Solaris and
  Windows NT
• recent articles suggest this may not be so in all
  cases
• Using beans gives may allow us to use existing
  editors for creating screens with existing
  composition editors
• JAVA popularity makes it a compelling candidate
• There seem to be some reliability issues still
  with JAVA and especially with running Applets

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JAVA Prototype Status

• Performance numbers done on raw JAVA and
  components
• Prototype is updating a text component through a
  native channel access cliient and caching the
  most recent value
• Display composition editiors for configuring JAVA
  Beans is under investigation - prototype drops
  text updates that connect to channel access
• Currently benchmarking JAVA beans
• JAVA based display manager using Applets is in
  use at Jlab
• ingests the MEDM ADL file
• many of the objects are already supported

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MMI - Next Step

• Choose a direction
• Form a team of contributing members (lots of
  interest on prototyping - but?)
• Divide the work with clean interfaces (i.e.)
• channel access interface to a value cache (keep
  high/low/current)
• display engine to load display and execute the
  display list
• component development sliders, plots, etc..
  (extensible)
• display list standardization
• plot components
• develop expression handler (or port the database
  to NT)
• Request for interested (funded) parties to
  participate.