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Minutes of MW meeting Wednesday 16 August 2000

Present: Alessandro, Jens, Kris (secretary), Marc, Nikolai, Steen, Vito

Next meeting: Wednesday, 30 August 2000 10h @ PS

Alessandro will reserve the room and make convocations. Kris is absent until 31 August.

1. Administrative.

Kris introduced Jens Andersson to the project members which he does not know yet. Jens is doing the OPC gateway development. 

The MW web server can be accessed at http://cern.ch/proj-cmw The previous reference http://cern.ch/controls-middleware is an alias now. I will successively transfer all the relevant information to this site. Please let me know if you have comments to the structure. I will also add permissions when I'm back.

2. Progress reports.

ORB API and implementation

The API design is stable now and implementation is progressing. First version shall be available by end of September.

Public API

Vito has to connect to Francois private MoM API so that Stephane, who has a client/server test working can use the public API instead of the private MoM. This is urgent as he is here until Sep. 1. The first version will only support simple data types until Nikolai provides classes for Data/DataEntry.

Testing

Stephane is about to finish the small application which is using a simulated device and displays continous and discrete properties. He can modify the frequency and number of measurement points. As there can be several clients as well this can serve as a good performance test. He is using the private MoM API and will connect to the public API as soon as available.

Server framework

The design is completed and implementation under progress. The first version is expected next week. There were some problems with compiler which does not deal with STL correctly.

The first version of the GM server (PS access to Equipment Modules) can be expected in September as part of development (passive device) has already been prepared. 

For the SL Equip gateway Kris will arrange with Pierre to discuss the best architecture. For the first meeting we also need Kris, Francois, Alex, Steen and Nikolai.

OPC gateway

Jens is fully operational now and also made some tests with CORBA (ORBacus installed) and OPC to understand the issues. Nikolai suggests to use ORBacus version 3 for operation as version 4 is reportedly buggy. Jens will work on the OPC client issues now and study if synchronous CORBA thread and OPC thread for callbacks can work in parallel. It has been suggested to serialialize synchronous requests in one thread.

In PS there is also a setup with OPC servers and this can be used for testing. The people to contact are Frank Locci or Giuseppe Mornacchi. 

Naming service

This is not urgent as the server can be set to some default. Nikolai raised another point which is the value of the CORBA name server and also other configuration values such as connection reuse, threading etc. ORBacus allows to use an URL to the configuration file and this has been found the most elegant and easy to configure. In ORBexpress there is no such equivalent but it supports the portable server addressing in form of  IOR.