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 multiplatform 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 Uniform Modeling Language (UML). Based on this description the new API has been implemented so far in C++, Python, and Java. 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, and 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-oriented API to 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.