THE ALMA COMMON SOFTWARE, ACS STATUS AND DEVELOPMENTS

Abstract

The ALMA Common Software (ACS) is a set of application frameworks built on top of CORBA to provide a common software infrastructure to all partners in the ALMA collaboration00. The main purpose of ACS is to simplify the development of distributed applications by hiding the complexity of the CORBA Middleware and guiding developers to use a documented collection of proven design patterns. ACS was presented at ICALEPCS 20010 and at that time covered the basic needs for the development of Control System applications. In these two years, the core services provided by ACS have been extended and become more stable and reliable, while the coverage of the application framework has been extended to satisfy the need of high level and data flow applications. This paper presents the status of ACS and developments over the last two years, but we will not go into technical details. An overview of ACS technical features can be found on the paper 0 from K.Zagar at this years conference. Details on ACS architecture and design can be found in the ACS Web Page0.