Bliss

There is a discussion ongoing about the future experiment control user interfaces. One of the questions is whether Sardana is sufficiently resourced, the other is whether other products come with other integrated services. In the current situation there is a lot of hearsay. That's why the following points have been put together.

 
 About the selection of an experiment control user interface for Petra IV
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There is an ongoing discussion about the Petra IV experiment control user
interfaces. Various aspects need to be considered. In the following I
give a list of the issues. The purpose of this note is to achieve a common
understanding of the options and to agree on how to proceed.

- BlueSky has been created at NSLS-II and is currently been used
  at several US labs: LCLS, SSRL, APS, ALS. Some European invest significant
  efforts to implement it: DLS, PSI, BESSY II, Soleil. The Australian Light 
  Source, the canadian Light Sourcee, the Pohang Light Source II are also
  interested.

- BLISS has been created at the ESRF and is in operation at most
  of the ESRF beamlines.

- BLISS has a direct path to the hardware and an interface to Tango.

- Petra IV will use Tango for device access.

- The BlueSky institutes use EPICS for device access.

- Both products are frameworks consisting of several components.

- Both products have Python as the scripting language.

- Both products deliver a functionality capable of controlling SR experiments.

- Both products are resourced sufficiently.

- The Petra IV project management is very much concerned with the overall
  picture. The product of choice should have good interfaces to services
  like visualization, elogbook, metadata capture, metadata catalogue,
  workflows for near real-time data processing and full reconstruction,

  + Metadata catalogue: the ESRF uses ICAT/ICAT-plus, DESY decided to use SciCat.
    Therefore the interface to the metadata catalogue does not favour one of
    the products.

  + DESY has no good elogbook. However, the DAPHNE project may solve this problem.

  + For me it not clear by now which product has a better interface to workflows.

- At the ESRF 2D detectors are handled with Lima. This product standardizes
  the access to all cameras. Lima comes with a variety of tools for
  data processing and visualization.

  The EPICS equivalent is the AreaDetector module.

  If Petra IV decides to select BlueSky, a BlueSky-Lima integration should be
  considered.

- The Helmholtz demonstrator project ROCK-IT plans to use BlueSky as the common user
  interface. During the first six months of the project BlueSky will be evaluated.
  One of the key issues is the Tango integration.

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- So far both products have not been carefully tested at DESY.

How to proceed:
  - do not make a final decision now
  - use ROCK-IT to test BlueSky
  - involve BLISS experts in the discussion

Status: BlueSky is running in docker, can access Tango on remote host, Jan Meyer and TK visit HZB next week for a BlueSky demo.