A new Object-oriented Interface to MDSplus

The MDSplus data acquisition and management software package is widely used in the international fusion research community. Its core Application Programming Interface (API) remained unchanged since the system was ported to a multi-platform environment in the late nineties. Originally written in C, the MDSplus API did not fully exploit several object-oriented features of the system that were included in the original architecture. In 2008 a project was initiated by the authors to provide the core MDSplus functionality with an object-oriented API. A generic, language-independent class structure has been defined and modeled in UML. Based on this description the new API has been implemented so far in C++, Python, and Java. Fortran 90 and Matlab interfaces are foreseen in 2009. The new API provides: -) Data Type Management, allowing the full exploitation of the rich set of data types defined in MDSplus by means of composition of data object instances; -) Pulse file access, for writing and reading data objects as well as managing database components properties. The definition of a language-independent class organization allows the MDSplus Object API be consistent across all the object oriented languages that will be supported. Regardless of the language used, this approach provides a much more natural programming interaction with MDSplus. Moreover, the UML graphical definition proved an effective and unambiguous way of documenting the system components. This document is composed of an abstract followed by the presentation slides. (authors)