Designing an Object-Oriented Data Processing Network

Abstract

There are many challenging aspects to processing data from a modern high-performance data acquisition system. The sheer diversity of data formats and protocols makes it very difficult to create a data processing application that can properly decode and display all types of data. Many different tools need to be harnessed to process and display all types of data. Each type of data needs to be displayed on the correct type of display. In particular, it is very hard to synchronize the display of different types of data. This tends to be an error prone, complex and very time-consuming process. This paper discusses a solution to the problem of decoding and displaying many different types of data in the same system. This solution is based on the concept of a linked network of data processing nodes. Each node performs a particular task in the data decoding and/or analysis process. By chaining these nodes together in the proper sequence, we can define a complex decoder from a set of simple building blocks. This greatly increases the flexibility of the data visualization system while allowing for extensive code reuse.