Pre-conference Workshops

Two pre-conference workshops on EPICS and SOftware SHaring (SOSH) will take place. EPICS will start on Thursday 30 September, at 9:30 in the "Oceania" room and continue through Friday 1 October. SOSH will take place on Saturday 2 October, starting at 9:30 also in the "Oceania" room.

EPICS (Organizer: M. Clausen (DESY, Germany))

EPICS, the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System's software tool kit is used in more than one hundred installations all over the world. Following the tradition of holding an EPICS workshop in conjunction with ICALEPCS it will be possible for newcomers to learn about EPICS and meet many of the members of the EPICS collaboration. In the spirit of the collaboration, EPICS users will be able to discuss with the developers and give input for new developments, thus contributing to the overall success.

The two days will focus on the following subjects:

1st day:

  • Introduction into EPICS and status reports from several installations

  • New developments in the creation of EPICS databases from Oracle and new sequencing tools

2nd day:

  • Support for new hardware

  • EPICS on Linux and Windows-NT

  • Porting EPICS core to other operating systems

  • News from channel access

  • New implementations in Java

 

SOftware SHaring (SOSH) '99 (Organizer: W. Watson (TJNAF, USA))

SOSH '99 continues a series of workshops aimed at exploring ways to improve the sharing of valuable software within the accelerator and detector controls community.

See also the SOSH Home Page at http://www.jlab.org/sosh/.

You are invited to take part in a one day workshop which will include:

  • Technical presentations on Java components developed within the community (including client and server/servlet, CORBA, beans)

  • Discussions on standardization efforts, continuing the work started at the last workshop (see: 'SOSH conventions for controls' at  http://www.jlab.org/sosh/).

This year particular emphasis will be placed on the sharing of Java components and packages. There are a number of good reasons for this emphasis:

  • A large fraction of our community has made a serious move in the last year to use Java

  • Everyone works from the same base libraries (Java class libraries)

  • Java encourages component oriented development in the form of cohesive packages, Java beans and more recently enterprise Java beans

  • Java integrates easily with widely used databases

  • Java can be used to develop both CORBA clients and servers (to support integration with non-Java components)

Among those who have made strong moves into Java are CERN, Fermilab, Jefferson Lab and the Swiss Light Source. In many cases these Java developments have a flavour similar to previous local control systems, but the potential for moving toward each other (and towards enhanced software sharing) has never been stronger than with the emergence of a language which is built on portability and reuse.


Photo by Ugo Borsatti, Archivio Storico "Foto Omnia"