Future Ideas

Future Ideas

The purpose of this page is two-fold:

1. to collect proposals for strategic ideas - major new features or developments of IBEX
2. to collect suggestions, opinions, comments on those ideas
   • pros v cons
   • risks & benefits
   • should we do them sooner or later?
   • how might they be implemented?
   • are there any pitfalls we need to avoid?, etc.

Please add your contributions to the relevant sections below. If you add a new strategic idea, please also add it to the table of Contents.

Contents

1. Make instrument\apps\epics read-only on deployment
2. Moving to Eclipse v4
3. Changing logging framework
4. Parallel building with make
5. Deploying individual IOCs
6. EPICS 3.15
7. Visual Studio 2015/2017
8. Blockserver Protocol
9. Mantid-IBEX Interactions

Make instrument\apps\epics read-only on deployment

Making instrument\apps\epics read-only on deployment

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Moving to Eclipse v4

We would like to take advantage of new features in CS-Studio 4. However, CS-Studio 4 requires the use of Eclipse v4. The current architecture of the IBEX client is not well-suited to make the process of migrating from Eclipse 3 to Eclipse 4 a straightforward process. We need to consider how best to achieve this migration.

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Changing Logging Framework

Changing logging framework

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Allow parallel building with make

Updating dependencies to allowing parallel building with make.

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Deploying and updating individual IOCs

Deploying and updating individual IOCs (so static building of all of EPICS, copying support db files -> ioc)

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Move to EPICS 3.15

Plan the migration from EPICS 3.14 -> EPICS 3.15.

• What is new in EPICS 3.15?
• Do we need to make any changes to our code to use EPICS 3.15?

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Moving to Visual Studio 2015 (or 2017)

As Visual Studio evolves, we need to keep up with new editions. We should consider moving to Visual Studio 2015, perhaps directly to Visual Studio 2017.

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Changing client -> blockserver protocol

Changing client -> blockserver protocol (is JSON over CA getting a bit restrictive?)

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Provide better interaction between Mantid and IBEX

We should work with Mantid and Instrument Scientists to find ways of using scripts to interact with both bits of software. A preliminary meeting came up with the following usecases:

1. Taking data until a sufficient signal to noise ratio has been reached in a peak. (useful for POLARIS and express runs)
2. Taking course scans across a transition then going back to take finer detail around the precise change
3. Automating the ALF workflow, (take data and rotate sample until peaks are found)

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Should globals.txt trump the configuration settings

Would it not make more sense if the configuration macros trumped globals.txt?

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