Tools based on CORBA (Orbix)
Rather than specifying “hardware addresses” (IP, memory, port number, …), we let the configuration tools connect to “services”, provided by named CORBA servers. In this way, we achieve a great deal of flexibility.
We need that because the things that need to come together always involve more than one crate and processor.
Configuration files don’t normally contain parameters such as processor names, which can change.
In the commissioning phase of the experiment, that has turned out to simplify things dramatically.
Most services and components receive names which are unique and can be accessed in a flexible fashion.
The most important services are the Event notifier, the Name server, and several object managers. All of them are CORBA servers which can be accessed remotely.
In general, each physical hardware component is represented by a (CORBA) object which controls the actual hardware.
We show a poster on this, poster 85 (Ed Desmond)