Discussion with Ken Stox (July 16, 1996)

He will be  away next  week but is  willing to  discuss  things with us. He
wanted me to send  him some more  details about  specifics of what we would
like him to present. 

I asked if he was a  Java expert, he commented  that he was not and  he did
not think there  were too many Java  experts as it is  not  widely used. He
said the development and debugging products are just starting to emerge and
anyone who wants to write applications needs to invest a lot upfront to get
them to work. Right now there are  drivers only for solaris and NT servers.
Netscape can be used as a java   engine on some platforms, also java clones
such as cafe. He wanted to know   more about  our applications and also the
audience who will use these tools. He sad he thought Python was technically
superior to Java, but this is not always what determines the longevity of a
product. Since we are looking for   tools which we hope to use for 10 to 15
years,   Java  may  be a  good   choice.  A lot   depends  on  our  overall
architecture. Java is very good at multi-threaded applications which may be
important for  us. Ken  suggested looking at   some  examples in the jigsaw
project at  CERN (www.w3.org)  which is the  only real use  of Jave that he
knows. 

He thought TCL and Java are good solutions. Mentioned AWT.

Asked  Ken about  OpenGL,  for  interactive  event  display, he  raised the
question of  whether OpenGL runs on  NT platform.  Discussed with him using
OODBMS for  data  storage, he asked  "why use OODB?"  and commented that he
knows  of no   truly OO  db.  Asked him  if he  knew of  any free  OO db he
suggested postgress,  from the makers of ingress.

Audience
--------

	1. Physicist end users

	2. developers and utility maintainers. Mostly physicists.


Examples
--------
	1. Global  Information access and management

	   a. User would like information on data processing for particular 
              event. Web page provides user complete information about 
              the chain of processing, versions etc. for a particular event
	   b. User would like information ablut status of online systems. 
              Web page gives complete access to control room information
              with graphics and tables showing status of any part of the 
              online system.
    	   c. User wants to submit a query for a particular set of 
              data object attribute requirements (cuts), and is returned
  	      i. estimated time for the query.
 	      ii. number of tape mount accesses required
	      iii. ask to proceed?
 	      iv. If the query proceeds, eventually user is provided with 
                  information for events selected. This can be in the form of
                  a list of event or object  pointers, or complete event 
                  data.  
	   d. Data manager has access to data usage patterns and can control
              configuration management of the data.

	2. Local application menu-based interface.

	   a. User runs  local event reconstruction or analysis package 
              and would like a convenient way to setup configuration. Needs
              flexible interface  and capability to submit jobs in batch 
              mode as well. 

	3. Interactive graphics interface

  	   a. Way to control and examine details of event display for viewing
               and analysis tasks.