A general-purpose Java tool for action dispatching and supervision in nuclear fusion experiments

In nuclear fusion experiments, the plasma discharge requires a preparation sequence followed by a data acquisition phase. During these phases, the control and data acquisition system is required to carry out a sequence of operations for set up of the various devices, data readout, and on-line computation. An action dispatcher tool must comply with several requirements such as the support for a distributed and heterogeneous environment, a comprehensive user interface for the supervision of the whole sequence, and the need for web-based support. The paper describes the architecture of a general-purpose Java-based tool for action dispatching. The use of the platform-independent Java framework, combined with the generic approach in the architecture definition, satisfies the above requirements. The Java framework has been chosen for the implementation because of its platform-independence, network, and multithreading support. The architecture of the tool has been kept quite generic, thus making the tool adaptable to a variety of operating environments with minimal changes in the application code.