Current Tasks for MX
Beamline support
- There is much work remaining to be done in bringing up the
various bending magnet lines, namely, APS 10-BM, 17-BM,
and 22-BM.
New MX versions
MX version 1.1
- This release will focus on eliminating the need to
look up MX records and fields from scratch on
each and every MX network message.
- A new MX_RECORD_FIELD_HANDLE structure will be added
to cache the information needed to quickly find
an MX record field, both in a remote server, and
in a client.
- This should provide a substantial performance boost
to operations such as scans that read out
values from many different MX records per point.
MX version 2.0
- This release will focus on revising how asynchronous
events are handled in MX.
- The existing event handlers in the MX server will be
moved to a new libMxEvent library.
- The libMxEvent library will be modified to be
useable by event driven clients as well.
- The callback support in libMxEvent will be
revived and brought into a useable state.
- Value changed callbacks will be the first kind of
callbacks to be supported.
- The server side event handling will be modified so
that the MX server can handle other protocols as
well such as the Spec and Blu Ice protocols.
- The EPICS portable channel access server will be used
to export MX drivers to EPICS clients.
New MX language interfaces
Java
- Java is widely taught in universities these days, so
Java support will make it easier to bring in
students to work on extensions to MX.
- The Java interface will be needed if MX beamline control
is to be more tightly integrated into JDirector
at IMCA-CAT.
- The language wrapper will be implemented using Java JNI.
IDL
- IDL has excellent support for scientific graphics
and plots.
- This language wrapper was requested by Mark Davidson
of Univ. of Florida.