Upgrading a TEXTOR Data acquisition system for remote participation using Java and Corba

The partners in the Trilateral Euregio Cluster (TEC) are implementing and developing Remote Participation technologies that are expected to support a joint research programme on the experimental facility TEXTOR-94. A common TEC architecture for our heterogeneous data acquisition and storage systems is seen to be one of the major issues. As a consequence, legacy systems will be affected and have to be upgraded for optimised wide area network communication, platform independent data access and display. The object oriented redesign of the system to be described follows theses guidelines. The architecture of the system under development uses Java as programming environment and CORBA as Client/Server communication standard. It is described in this paper, how an operational Data Acquisition CAMAC subsystem of TEXTOR-94 based on OpenVMS and Decnet communications could be redesigned into an open, object oriented architecture in a platform independent way. A suitable Web Browser is required on the client side without further installation of application software to run the server. CORBA static method invocations are used for the communication between the client and server. At the server side, there is only Java code on top of the existing commercial OpenVMS CAMAC device driver. A modular object oriented software design permitted to eliminate dependencies of the generic module levels from the underlying bus systems. Porting of the Java code to other platforms like Windows NT and Linux has proven to be successful. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.