Application development using the ALMA common software

The ALMA Common Software (ACS) provides the software infrastructure used by ALMA and by several other telescope projects, thanks also to the choice of adopting the LGPL public license. ACS is a set of application frameworks providing the basic services needed for object oriented distributed computing. Among these are transparent remote object invocation, object deployment and location based on a container/component model, distributed error, alarm handling, logging and events. ACS is based on CORBA and built on top of free CORBA implementations. Free software is extensively used wherever possible. The general architecture of ACS was presented at SPIE 2002. ACS has been under development for 6 years and it is midway through its development life. Many applications have been written using ACS; the ALMA test facility, APEX and other telescopes are running systems based on ACS. This is therefore a good time to look back and see what have been until now the strong and the weak points of ACS in terms of architecture and implementation. In this perspective, it is very important to analyze the applications based on ACS, the feedback received by the users and the impact that this feedback has had on the development of ACS itself, by favoring the development of some features with respect to others. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of this analysis and discuss what we would like to do in order to extend and improve ACS in the coming years, in particular to make application development easier and more efficient.