The Java interface of MDSplus: towards a unified approach for local and remote data access

The paper presents the main design concepts of the new Java interface of th e MDSplus system, a data acquisition system currently in use in several fus ion devices that is becoming the standard 'de facto' for data access in US fusion laboratories. The interface is currently composed of two tools, whic h represent the extension of the two original, X-Windows-based MDSplus inte rface tools. The first one, called jScope, provides interactive display of stored waveforms. The second one, called jTraverser, provides graphical sup port for navigation into the tree structure of the pulse files and for the set-up of experiment devices. Though both tools support network communicati on, remote data access has been considered as a key issue for jScope, in or der to make it a general purpose tool for data display, which can be connec ted to a variety of experiments. Our experience in the development of these tools confirmed the widespread concept about the promising features of the Java language. In particular, the object oriented organization of the lang uage and the rich set of support classes allowed an impressive reduction in the time required for development and testing. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S .A. All rights reserved.