The Use of ACOP Tools in Writing Control System Software

Several institutes are making increasing use of PCs in accelerator controls. In particular, Windows NT and/or Windows 95 is already, or is becoming, a supported platform at the client-end in a variety of control systems. Notably, control systems at CERN/ISOLDE, DESY/HERA, KEK/PF-LINAC, Daresbury, ISA (Denmark), MSI (Sweden), and ESRF currently make use of Windows NT as a control system client. As all of these control systems are either object-oriented or object-based, their is a considerable overlap in their functionality and required features. This point was realized at the PCaPAC '96 workshop, and gave rise to the ACOP work group, which stands for Accelerator Component Oriented Programming. The first fruit born of this group is the ACOP.OCX (OLE Control eXtension) ActiveX control. MicrosoftTM ActiveX controls are the updated version of the former OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) control specification. The ACOP control has been designed in order to support the common functionality requirements of object-oriented and object-based control systems. The binary form is shareable on all Win32 platforms. This report gives an overview of the functionality of ACOP.OCX and its implementation at CERN and DESY, together with the progress on a compatible Java bean.