Re: [EXTERNAL] DM/GUI for EPICS a comparison

["Kasemir, Kay via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi:

> I have used Phoebus, and it is trouble free to build and execute, support ...

> I am curious as to how discontinuation of JAVAFX by Oracle is going to affect it?? Is there any future development roadmap?

Good question.

For now, the unbundling of JavaFX is actually good.

In the past, you needed to have the correct JRE, the one from Oracle which included JavaFX, to run phoebus.

Now JavaFX is just another 3rd party library that we include in the phoebus/lib folder, and you can run phoebus with openjdk (or the latest oracle jre if you buy that).

https://openjfx.io has been publishing updates to JavaFX in lockstep with each OpenJDK update, so it's not dead.

But predictions are hard, especially about the future.

These days there is certainly an emphasis on web tools, and less investment in desktop graphics.

Plus any graphics-related technology tends to change quite rapidly. While the basics of the EPICS database and IOC code have been continuing for 30+ years, on the display side you will likely continue to see changes every 5..10 years.

So instead of spending a lot of time to pick one display tool now, thinking you can then stay with that forever, I'd anticipate that you'll need to handle changes. Phoebus can open/convert EDM, MEDM and the older CS-Studio *.opi files. There is a web runtime for the *.bob files. They are not 100% compatible, but unless the displays delve into the tricky details of EDM, MEDM, *.opi, most of them work just fine, and sure beats having to re-create the displays from scratch.

-Kay