Web Interfaces to MDSplus Data*W. Davis, P. Roney, T. Carroll, T. Gibney, D. Mastrovito Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ 08543

ABSTRACT

The MDSplus Data Acquisition System has been used successfully on NSTX at PPPL since early 1999. While the X-window-based tools supplied with MDSplus are powerful, and the IDL programming language and the supplied TDI language are effective for complex and specialized analyses, some users prefer the convenience of applications which can be run in a Web browser. Web users don't need to know about X-windows, or even have accounts or privileges on server computers. MDSplots.html reads MDSplus "Scope" setup files and plots MDSplus signals with overlays. It uses a Perl script to open a pipe to an IDL subprocess, so security and performance issues are a concern. TreeSearch.html provides several options for finding information in MDSplus trees. MDSshots.html lists shots where the maximum for a specified signal is above or below a specified value. A variety of information in an MS-SQL database is also accessible from a Web browser. These utilities could be used at other sites which data in MDSplus.

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*Work Supported by US DOE Contract No. DE-AC02-76CHO-3073

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Why Use the Webto Access Data?

Platform Independence

No Accounts or Passwords necessary No special software needed

No OS (e.g. Unix) knowledge needed

No environmental variables needed (e.g. Paths)

X-windows setup can be difficult

Methods Used

HTML Forms

TCP/IP Ports

Perl Script

Interactive Data Language (IDL)

Active Server Pages

Unix Shell Scripts

Standard Security Practices

Unix Cron Jobs

Sample of Output from MDSplots Page

SUMMARY

Big help for some users

No performance problems

Not too difficult to build and maintain

No Security Problems

Happy Users