Scala API for remote monitoring and control

Created by robcd on 2009-07-20. Updated: 2009-07-21, 17:35

The EISCAT Svalbard Radar is a fixed 42m dish and a fully steerable 32m dish used for research into the Suns interaction with the magnetosphere. JMaCS, the Java API derived from experimental software developed for the monitoring and controlling of these dishes, has recently been rewritten in Scala.

In this paper, soon to be presented at the forthcoming 14th International EISCAT Workshop, it is explained how, with the help of Scala's type members and the 'type-safe singleton' pattern, the new API allows a range of 'programmable device' components to be written more concisely, and in a type-safe manner. Comparisons are made with the original Java implementation.

This move to Scala was motivated by the better support provided for writing components, such as Programmable Devices(PDs), with traits, a more concise syntax, type inferencing and Actors. However, type-safety, language extensibility via libraries, functional programming and scripting proved to be invaluable.