Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Johnson, Andrew N." <[email protected]> · Thu, 18 Oct 2018 15:33:18 +0000

Hi Bastian,

On 10/11/2018 01:45 AM, Dr. Bastian Löher wrote:
> I'm working on integration of some of our (non-EPICS) software 
> components with EPICS. I'd like to add CAS functionality to these 
> programs instead of 'making them into an IOC'. The idea is, that these 
> programs should publish a couple of PVs each to make their status 
> available (mostly read-only).
> 
> My goal is to write a Server/PV library that I can use for all my 
> programs and a C wrapper API to call into this library.

For your use-case it seems to me that it would be simpler for your
programs to use the CA client library to write their status to a PV that
is hosted by a soft IOC running on some shared server. The CA client
library is much simpler to use than the CAS.

> Or, as a general question: Since the PCAS library is now factored out of 
> base, does that mean it will be deprecated at some point? Is there an 
> alternative being developed?

The CAS will have to be maintained for as long as sites need to use the
CA Gateway and CA Nameserver, but at this stage we are not intending to
make any changes to the CA protocol so the maintenance should mostly be
ensuring that it continues to build on current operating systems.

Recent community developments have been to develop the new pvAccess
protocol and the software to communicate with that. This is not related
to new CA server that Jeff Hill mentioned, AFAIK only LANL is currently
using that code.

HTH,

- Andrew

-- 
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System