AbstractUser-friendly visualization tools are indispensable for quick recognition of experimental data. One such tool, the dwscope component of the MDS-Plus system, is widely used to visualize the data that MDS-Plus acquires. However, the National Institute for Fusion Science does not use MDS-Plus, so our researchers on the Large Helical Device (LHD) project cannot use dwscope without modification. Therefore, we developed a new visualization tool, NIFScope. The user interface of NIFScope is based on JavaScope, which is a Java version of dwscope, but NIFScope has its own unique characteristics, including the following: (1) the GUI toolkit is GTK+; (2) Ruby is the equation evaluator; and (3) data loaders are provided as Ruby modules. With these features, NIFScope becomes a multi-purpose and flexible visualization tool. For example, because GTK+ is a multi-platform open source GUI toolkit, NIFScope can run on both MS-Windows and UNIX, and it can be delivered freely. The second characteristic enables users to plot various equations besides experimental data. Furthermore, Ruby is an object-oriented script language and is widely used on the Internet, allowing it to serve not only as an equation evaluator but also as an ordinal programming language. This means users can easily add new data loaders for their own data formats.
Object-oriented design for LHD data acquisition using client-server model