The TEC Web-Umbrella

The TEC community operates the TEXTOR device and in doing so collects and stores data from a number of different front-end acquisition systems, processing codes and analysis systems. Due to the evolution of these systems in the past, different, distributed data storage technologies were used to record this data. In an attempt to reduce the number of interfaces client codes have to use when accessing data from these data stores, an "umbrella" concept was developed: a software-layer that covers (as an "umbrella") as many as possible of these stores and provides a unified access mechanism to them. We explored the possibility of using the widely supported HTTP protocol for this purpose; this is the core protocol of the World-Wide-Web and it is capable of transporting almost any type of data. The concepts behind using this protocol were based on earlier work at JET. Access via this umbrella has been provided to the most important data stores around TEXTOR and access to others is being added regularly. Clients codes, libraries and programs have been developed for several user environments. The HTTP based concepts and the data-access via this system have been found to be highly portable. This paper gives an overview of the TEC Web-Umbrella. system, it describes the basic concepts of this system and it presents some of the client-side codes and programs. The paper also reports on some first (tentative) user experiences with it. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.