New features for new applications with ABEANS 3.1

Abeans are Java-based client framework for building control system applications. Cosylab has set as its primary design goal the ability to adapt them for a wide range of underlying architectures. By relying heavily on object oriented modelling, we have modularized them vertically into services, such as logging, exception handling, configuration and resource management; and horizontally into layers, such as plug layer, modelling layer and presentation layer. Portable generic applications as well as deployments in ANKA, ALMA, GSI, DESY, Diamond and SNS demonstrate that the basic premises of the design were sound. In this article we discuss, using a specific example of Control Desk application (a generic table application) developed originally for Diamond, the main features available by the generic nature of Abeans. We address the basic question of how to trade flexibility for performance, and are careful to distinguish various kinds of overhead (one-time initialization, memory footprint, CPU consumption etc.). Strategies used in Abeans to improve performance of Java are presented.