Using XML and Java for telescope and instrumentation control
Troy Ames, Lisa Koons, Kenneth B. Sall, Craig Warsaw · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and AppNet, Inc. are developing a general and highly extensible framework that applies to any kind of instrument that can be controlled by a computer. The software architecture combines the platform independent processing capabilities of Java with the power of the Extensible Markup Language, a human readable and machine understandable way to describe structured data. A key aspect of the object-oriented architecture is software that is driven by an instrument description. This description is written using the Astronomical Instrument Markup Language, a domain specific implementation of the more generalized Instrument Markup Language (IML). IML is used to describe graphical user interfaces to control and monitor the instrument, command sets and command formats, data streams, communication mechanisms, and data processing algorithms.