Evaluation of Java for Use in Control Systems

[oothoudt@lanl.gov (Mike Oothoudt)]

I am doing an evaluation of the Java programming language for use in
Control Systems and plan to publish a short paper at the Real Time 99
Conference in June.

While Java is not very useful for real time computing (yet--a rt version is
being talked about), it can be useful for OPI programming.

What issues would be important to evaluate for the use of Java at your
facility?

At the LANSCE accelerator, the two most important issues that have come up
are:

1) Slow startup of applications.  Operators start applications to respond
to alarm and alert conditions.  A simple application written here took 7-10
seconds to get to the point where the operator could get information --
intolerable.  (Fortunately, a few changes to the operating environment got
the startup time below 0.6 seconds, without changes to the application code.)

2) Access to data.  Ability to read/write/monitor Channel Access data as
well as data from our legacy control system is vital.  (I have identified 3
efforts to access CA data in Java.  Are you doing anything on this?  Most,
but not all, of our legacy data can be gotten through a CA gateway.)