ALMA Common Software

This document contains the Agenda (under preparation) for a 1-week ACS Course that will be held in Garching.

The first day of the week will be dedicated to an ACS Workshop with all ACS users from various projects.

It is the first time we have two parallel track and so many participants to an ACS course and we hope we will be able to provide a good pregram and good course material.

Each item in the agenda links to the corresponding course material (typically Power Point presentations). Many presentations linked until now come from previous courses and are being updated. Still a number of presentations contain little or no material, since the presentations have been given directly on the whiteboard or with a PC live demonstration, but we want to improve and extend this material in and for future issues of this course. If you have suggestions or material that can integrate what available now, you are encouraged to contribute it.

Beginner's track

The following days are dedicated to an in-depth analysis of ACS for people having to start soon developing code with it.

Although the Agenda looks quite detailed, the idea is to be flexible and adapt dynamically the program to the needs and knowledge of the participants. This means that we expand and contract the time allocated to the various topics based on the feedback collected during the course.

We assign plenty of time for exercises, because we want the participants to get an actual on-hands experience. Part of this time is dedicated to a “real project”, i.e. to a work that is of real practical use for the work to be done afterwardswith ACS. Again, if needs arises, exercise time can be traded with discussions and with extensions to tutorial topics.

We assume to start at about 10:00 in the morning and close “official activities” at about 16:00 in the afternoon.

On Thursday we have lost a few hours, since we have been invited to close out sessions and go home because of a very heavy storm coming.
Therefore on Friday we have been starting 30min earlier and we have organized a pizza-lunch.

Time	Program	Notes
08:30 09:00	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day.
09:00 09:30	Exercises: Deployment and configuration database. Deploy your own components across multiple machines.	Exercise time. (Instructors minimal participation: HSO)
09:30 10:00	Baci properties: Concepts	B.Jeram
10:00 10:30	Baci properties: C++ API	B.Jeram
10:30 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 12:00	Exercises: Extend the interface of your Component with properties and implement it. Use ObjectExplorer to create monitors and diagrams.	Exercise time. (Instructors minimal participation: ACA)
12:00 12:30	Pizza Lunch, part 1 Setup a testing environment: TAT and trivial Python clients to test a Component. Automatic modular testing using TAT	P.Sivera, J.Ibsen
12:30 13:00	Pizza Lunch, part 2 Java client, Eclipse, JUnit test for our component Reference presentations: JUnit demo and ACS testing example Eclipse setup (ACS FAQ)	H.Sommer This is an interactive presentation and the slides have not been used. Heiko has shown Eclipse, how to write a Java client in a JUnit environment and how to use it in a JUnit test run from eclipse to test the component developed together. Everybody has done the same step by step following Heiko. The presentations listed here are "post session" readings containing all infornation shown during the session itself.
13:00 14:00	Integration of our project and integration tests.	(Instructors minimal participation: PSI)
14:00 15:00	Course wrap-up, summary, feedback, etc	Joint final session.
15:00	End of course	Instructors available until 17:00 for discussions.

Advanced track

In the advanced track we plan to have the days split normally in two/three sections:

Advanced lesson topics
One section will go in depth with important ACS topics.
This will have the form of lesson/presentation, with exercices and dsicussions.
Design workshop.
One section will see a group presenting the design/architecture for one of their subsystems or a problem to discuss.
The participants will discuss together and with the help of the Instructors we will come with a solution that uses at the best the features and facilities provided by ACS.
This will be great opportunity for different groups to compare the approach they have taken to solve their problems and to get fresh ideas from other groups.

The selection of topics is flexible and we can also split the class in two separate groups if we have highly relevant topics that are of interest only to a subset of the participants.

Tuesday the 16^th:

Time	Program	Notes
09:00 09:30	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day.
09:30 11:00	ACS Logging and Error Systems: usage and applications	(Instructors minimal participation: BJE, GCH, JIB)
11:00 12:00	Design Workshop. ACS at ANKA: Technical Details	30 min presentation + 30 min discussion; should end before noon on Tuesday due to Igor's timing constraints Igor will report on the adjustments and bug-fixes he and his team had to make to get ACS working for ANKA. Some of these might be beneficial to ACS HEAD, therefore the presentation would be followed by a discussion on which adjustments, and how, to incorporate into the HEAD. (Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB)
12:00 13:00	Lunch
13:00 15:30	ACS Alarm System: usage and applications	(Instructors minimal participation: ACA, JIB)
15:30 16:30	Design Workshop. Reliability with and within ACS	20 min presentation + 40 min discussion Klemen will give an overview of techniques and technologies used to improve reliability of distributed systems. He will also present a reliability analysis of ACS. Presentation would be followed by a design-level discussion on how to make ACS more reliable. (Instructors minimal participation: BJE, ACA)
16:30 18:00	Generalized TCS (gTCS) (from R.Lemke) What would interest me are the following questions: Where is the border line between real time and non real time OS (minimal real time, or simply everything in RT)? Here it would be good if all available TCS system could be presented and it should made clear where the line is. What should be supported in the initial gTCS IDL? Where will be the different modes (scanning, pointing corrections, guiding) implemented (all in one IDL, or different modules, what are the real time requirements?)? Is there an acceptance from the other teams? Would they allow to test out the gTCS, or even maybe adapt it to their running systems? Of cause we should iterate.	(Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB)
18:00	End of day

Wednesday the 17^th:

Time	Program	Notes
09:00 09:30	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day. (Instructors minimal participation: BJE, HSO)
09:30 12:00	Multi-threading with ACS libraries in CPP and/or Java. Management of multiple threads. Component's threads. Synchronisation.	(Instructors minimal participation: BJE, HSO)
12:00 13:00	Lunch
13:00 14:30	Using the ACS Bulk Data to transfer big amounts of data (images, scientific data)	constraints: can be only Wednesday orThursday (Instructors minimal participation: PDI, BJE)
14:30 15:00	Discussion: Dynamic Components and Containers	(Instructors minimal participation: HSO, BJE)
15:00 16:00	Discussion: ACS Makefile	(Instructors minimal participation: MZA)
16:00 17:30	Design workshop. Architecture and design of the ATM (atmospheric) software for ALMA	A group proposes a tipoic to be discussed: the design and/or the architecture or an applications or an implementation problem to be analyzed together.
19:30	Social dinner at the Seehaus Restaurant

Thursday the 18^th:

Time	Program	Notes
09:00 09:30	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day. (Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB, HSO)
09:30 12:00	Using the ACS Notification Channel	(Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB, HSO)
12:00 13:00	Lunch
13:00 15:00	Real time control with ACS: RTAI support (B.Jeram) Building a kernel module (T.Juerges) Other options: VxWork	(Instructors minimal participation: BJE, JIB, TJU)
15:00	*Sessions interrubted because of major thunderstorm*

Friday the 19^th:

Time	Program	Notes
08:30 09:00	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day.
09:00 10:00	Testing strategies in distributed and asynchronous systems	(Instructors minimal participation: HSO)
10:30 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 12:00	Understanding ACS Properties: creating DevIOs, monitoring, alarms	(Instructors minimal participation: BJE)
12:00 13:00	Joint pizza lunch in Council Room
13:00 14:00	ALMA Archive	(Instructors minimal participation: HME, AWI) Holger Meuss, Andreas Wicenek
14:00 15:00	Joint final session
15:00	Real end of course

Other topics that were proposed for discussion and should have been discusset on Friday:

-----------------------

Course examples

During the whole course, the presentations will mostly develop one single example (a telescope Mount or something similar).

The code for the example is in the ACS CVS archive under: ACS/LGPL/CommonSoftware/acscourse.

You can fing here:

Course exercises

During the course we will form groups that will develop and exend an exercise.

The main idea is to think about a project where every group will have to develop a part.

At the end of the course, all parts will have to be integrated together and function as a single system.

In this way we will go through all phases of a project using ACS and the Software Engineering practices supported and fostered by ACS, from inception to definition of interfaces, implementation, testing and integration. A major part of the work will actually to understand (and apply) the lilfe-cycle of a project using ACS and the SE practices use in the ALMA project.

---> What could be the project we want to develop together? Any suggestions?

These are examples from previous courses:

The groups are expected to cleanup and improve the exercises as a follow-up of the course.
Once the cleanup will be completed, the exercises will be archived in the ACS CVS server for further usage and extension:

Course setup and computing facilities

We have used PCs with Linux RH-E/SL, ACS 6.0.x and Eclipse installed and we organize people in groups of 2 or 3.

The PCs are connected to the internet, with access to the ACS Web Pages and equipped with the Acrobat reader to allow reading PDF documents and Open Office to view Power Point presentations

Summary

We will put here a summary of the course.

What follows is for example the summary of the previous course:

This course has been quite different from the previous. The interest of the participants was very strongly directed torward C++ control applications and therefore we have radically changed the agenda day by day to satisfy this specific requests.We put also a strong emphasis on exercises, actually much more than originally foreseen. The participants have been very happy of this way of working. On the downside, we wanted to have each day a group writing Day Notes, but it was not possible because the groups were very involved in the exercises.

Unused presentations

The following tipics have not been covered in this course by explicit presentation.
Some of the argument discussed by these presentations have been discussed on the whiteboard or during the exercises.
Others have not been touched at all. They have been covered in previous courses and might be in upcoming courses, depending on the specific requirements of the course.

We have left them here for reference, but please be aware that the information might refer to older versions of ACS and might not be up to date.

Time	Program	Notes
	Exercises: Implement JUnit tests for your component.	Exercise time. (Instructors minimal participation: HSO)
	Quick overview of ACS Error System : Concepts. Already during the presentation we define Exceptions (or Completions) for the car component (XML, IDL, C++). (including a discussion about C++ filename conventions to track from errors back to files.) We add at least one log message to the component, and use the jlog tool.	B.Jeram Guided exercise -- every group makes similar additions to their component.
	Exercises: Setup error handling in the component implementation.	Exercise time.
	ACS Notification Channel: concepts of ACS (and CORBA) Notification Service	G.Chiozzi
	What is ACS? Common Software and Middleware.The services provided by ACS: Architecture Overview.ACS Packages. Comparison with VLT CCS	G.Chiozzi Up to date ACS 4.1
	Distributed systems Introduction to CORBA concepts	Sommer Up to date ACS 4.1
	ACS documentation walkthrough	B.Jeram Up to date ACS 4.1
	ACS Tutorial: Build the first Java component.	H.Sommer Up to date ACS 4.1
	ACS Tutorial: Build the first Python Component.	D.Fugate Up to date for ACS 3.0
	ACS Tutorial: Build a Python Client	D.Fugate Up to date for ACS 3.0
	Exercises: Develop a Python Client for you own component.	Exercise time.
	Guided discussion: how to identify what should become a component? How to allocate interfaces to components?	G.Chiozzi, H.Sommer? Here people should present what various subsystems have been doing and this should be discussed.
	Introduction to Offshoot classes	H.Hafok Mostly up to date for ACS 3.0
	ACS Error System APIs: Python	D.Fugate Up to date for ACS 3.0
	ACS Error System APIs: Java	B.Jeram, H.Sommer, D.Fugate (parallel tables or interleaved presentations/exercices) Mostly up to date for ACS 3.0 Slides for Java nor written
	Property interfacing to hardware: developing DevIO interfaces	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 3.0
	Exercises with DevIO
	Building hierarchies of components and having components referring to other components. Lifecycle issues.	H.Sommer Out of date: ACS 2.1
	ACS Time System	D.Fugate Up to date for ACS 3.1
	Data entities (Java/XML binding)	H.Sommer Mostly up to date for ACS 3.0
	Transparent (de-)serialization of XML in Java	H.Sommer Mostly up to date for ACS 3.0
	Exercises with XML Serialisation
	New developments in ACS: Code Generation	H.Sommer
	Adding asynchronous behavior: Mount3 IDL interface. Callbacks in ACS	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 3.0
	Exercises with asynchronous behavior	Includes coffee break
	ACS Configuration Database, Basic Concepts	H.Sommer Up to date for ACS 4.1. Merged with CDB deployment in short form.
	Deployment of ACS Components, manager, multiple containers and CDB configuration, multiple hosts Deployment Configuration Database	H.Sommer Up to date for ACS 4.1. Merged with CDB concepts in short form.
	ACS Logging System APIs: Java	H.Sommer, G.Chiozzi Up to date for ACS 3.1
	ACS Logging System APIs: Python	H.Sommer, G.Chiozzi Up to date for ACS 3.0
	Exercise: Add logging and monitoring to the Components and Clients	Includes coffee break
	Multi threading in Java	H.Sommer
	Exercises: Make your Component multi-threaded.	Exercise time. Includes Coffee break
	ACS NotificationChannel APIs: C++	G.Chiozzi, H.Sommer Up to date for ACS 4.1.
	ACS NotificationChannel APIs: Java	G.Chiozzi, H.Sommer Up to date for ACS 4.1.
	ACS NotificationChannel APIs: Python	G.Chiozzi, H.Sommer Up to date for ACS 4.1
	Exercices: Notification Channel	Includes coffee break
	Introduction to ACS Bulk Data transfer	S.Harrington
	ACS on VxWorks	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 3.0
	ACS on Real Time Linux	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 3.0
	An example of Control System based on ACS: TICS and/or APEX from the ACS point of view	B.Gustafsson See also an older presentation on TICS architecture and ACS
	ACS Alarm System and Alarm Display	B.Jeram Out of date: ACS 2.1
	ACS Linux Installation	P.Sivera Out of date: ACS 2.1
	Using third party libraries with ACS: Makefile and linking issues	B.Jeram No slides available
	Introduction to ABeans and	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 3.0
	ABeans programming Tutorial	B.Jeram Out of date: ACS 2.1
	Exercises: Implementation of the exercise. Error handling. GUI building
	Introduction to ABeans 3	I.Verstovsek Out of date: ACS 2.1
	Introduction to ACE. ACS threads and multi threading and synchronisation with ACE and ACS	B.Jeram Up to date for ACS 4.1
	Introduction to Cosylab development	M.Plesko Out of date: October 2002
	ALMA Archive Overview	A.Wicenec Out of date: ACS 3.0
	ALMA Archive Tutorial	H.Meuss Out of date: ACS 3.0
	ACS as the framework for the ALMA data flow system	H.Sommer SW Technology Forum 2002 Partially in German
	Discussion on High Level software, usage of Java, testing strategies and software engineering. To be better specified.	H.Sommer
	ALMA SW Development tools and Integration Guidelines What are rules? Why do we try to standardize everything and in particular platform, OS and compiler versions? ACS Software Engineering presentation	H.Sommer Mostly up to date for ACS 3.0 Out of date: ACS 2.1
	Take a real application and analyse it all together in the ACS perspective	Includes coffee break
	Putting it all together: Build a complete example.	Includes coffee break
	Discussion: what ACS features are supported by each language? ACS feature matrix by language or Another version of the feature matrix	G.Chiozzi Up to date for ACS 3.0
	Final round table discussion Course summary, discussions and feedback.

Send comments to <Gianluca Chiozzi gchiozzi@eso.org>

Last modified: 2006-12-06

Time	Program	Notes
09:00 09:15	Welcome Course organization and setup.Agenda overview.	Joint tracks G.Chiozzi
09:15 09:45	The Big Picture	H.Sommer
09:45 10:30	Component Container and Lifecycle Management Part.1	H.Sommer
10:30 10:50	Coffee break
10:50 11:10	Component Container and Lifecycle Management Part.2	H.Sommer
11:10 12:00	Running ACS: Starting up and stopping ACS. Running the examples Using the basic ACS tools: Object Explorer, Logging Client Demo Setup ACS Environment Variables ACS Cheatsheet	B.Jeram
12:00 13:00	Lunch break
13:00 14:00	Group exercises Start and stop ACS, play with demo components	Exercise time (Instructors minimal participation: BJE)
14:00 14:30	Lifecycle of a project based on ACS: - Identify requirements - Identify interfaces - Create a subsystem/module - Implement the interfaces - Implement a simulation - Implement a test - Implement the real functionality - Integration with the rest of the world	G.Chiozzi (Instructors minimal participation: JIB)
14:30 15:00	Define our project: brainstorming about the project we want to build and how to split it into components, assignments to groups	(Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB)
15:00 15:30	Coffee break
15:30 15:50	Software Engineering basic rules: - The subsystem and module structure - The ACS Makefile	M.Zamparelli
15:50 16:10	Defining the interface for a component: The Mount1 IDL interface Generate a module using the acsGenerator form the HPT project.	G.Chiozzi (Instructors minimal participation: JIB)
16:10 17:00	Group exercises Build your first component - Setup the module structure for your project - Define your own IDL interface - See what gets generated by the IDL compilers.	Exercise time (Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB, MZA)
17:00 17:30	Day wrap-up: questions and doubts	Joint session
17:30	End of day. Exercise/discussion time for the ones that want to stay longer

Time	Program	Notes
09:00 09:30	What ACS nightmares did you have? Questions and answers.	This should be a little discussion at the start of each course day.
09:30 10:00	The ACS Component's Simulator and other strategies for simulation	J.Ibsen (Instructors minimal participation: GCH)
10:00 10:40	Group exercises Build a simulator for your Component	Exercise time (Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB)
10:40 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 11:30	Archiving your project, sharing it with others and building it: introduction to CVS, INTROOT and project builds	M.Zamparelli (Instructors minimal participation: GCH)
11:30 12:00	Group exercises - Archive your project - Setup an integration area - Build all projects together Create a project/subsystem Makefile	(Instructors minimal participation: GCH, JIB)
12:00 13:00	Lunch break
14:30 15:00	Coffee break
15:00 15:30	Build the first component. Watch Gianluca create a MOUNT1 implementation in C++ using the ACS generator.	G.Chiozzi
15:30 16:30	Group exercises. Run the MOUNT1 component. Build your first component - Develop an implementation with support from the instructors	Exercise time
16:30 17:00	Build the first component. Watch Heiko create a MOUNT1 implementation in Java	H.Sommer
17:00 17:30	Day wrap-up: questions and doubts	Joint session.
17:30	End of day. Exercise/discussion time for the ones that want to stay longer
19:30	Social dinner at the Seehaus Restaurant


	ALMA Common Software

ACS 4 days (1-week) Course in Garching