Evaluation of JAVA 2 and CORBA for platform independent control and monitoring of the next generation of the CODA data acquisition system

The CODA data acquisition system was developed as a common data acquisition environment for experiments at Jefferson lab. The control and monitoring system was developed in EIFFEL and later ported to C++. The original design ran on ULTRIX and has been ported to HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX and Linux. The porting process is tedious and error prone. The code is difficult to maintain and the principal authors have left the group. With this in mind we are evaluating JAVA as a portable, and stable, language with which to write the next generation run control system. In parallel we are evaluating CORBA as the communication mechanism. The recent release of Java 2 with integrated support for CORBA has made this route even more interesting. This paper presents the results of our evaluation of tools and technologies, experience gained while writing a prototype of the preliminary design for the control system.