Satisfying wishes for SKA engineers : How Taranta suite meets users' needs

SKA Construction phase we are now in a transition phase that hopefully will prepare us for the next challenge: start building the SKA. One of the targets of this period is to evaluate the suitability of the Taranta (proper Webjive) Suite for creating engineering User Interfaces (UIs). The Taranta suite is a framework that allows the fast creation of web UIs that directly communicate with TANGO devices. What we need to address are the answers to questions such as: What kind of interface are you targeting? What are the performance constraints that you foresee? What are the current limitations of the tool that would make you choose a different one instead? What will the context of use be? What kind of features would you like the tool to have

How Taranta provides tools to build user interfaces for TANGO devices in the SKA integration environment without writing a line of code

Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a project aimed to build the largest radio telescope in the world and it has just gotten into the construction phase. In this phase, the ability to develop and integrate software in an integration environment is crucial as it is the ability to visualize system-related information via a User Interface to rapidly verify the correctness of the system behavior and spot any anomaly. This is achieved by SKA teams thanks to the deployment of the Taranta suite in the integration environment. Taranta suite is a web-based toolset jointly developed by MAX IV Laboratory and the SKA that allows the fast development of graphical user interfaces connected to TANGO devices, based on a set of predefined widgets and a drag-and-drop mechanism and therefore without the need to write any additional code. In this paper, we present the Taranta general architecture and the main widgets currently available, we describe how the Taranta suite is deployed in the SKA integration environment and we explain the process used to collect feedback from the SKA community to define the roadmap for the future development of the tool