New Approach in Developing Open XAL Applications

Open XAL project is a pure-Java open source development environment used for creating accelerator physics applications, scripts and services. Working with Open XAL requires developing a Java application with a prominent graphical user interface, allowing the final user to interact with the accelerator model, and to graphically view the results such interaction produced. Nevertheless the Open XAL support for specialized components1 and for a document-view application framework2, a lot of boilerplate code has still to be created, making the developer spending more time in UI than in accelerator physics code. In this paper a new approach in developing Open XAL applications is explained. Here the developer is relieved of the UI-related common code by using software tools, allowing him to visually design the flow of data and events between the various elements of the applications (widgets and models), and automatically generate the application code, where code generation can be customized to use one of the available plugged languages (Java, Python, JS, . . . ).