NOBUGS 2026

At the European XFEL, the in-house developed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, Karabo [1], has supported scientific experiments at the photon beamlines since user operations began in 2017. The Karabo GUI, the main graphical user interface of the system, was developed as a multipurpose desktop application based on Python [2] and Qt [3] and serves as the primary entry point to the control system. KIWI (Karabo’s Interactive Web Interface) extends Karabo by bringing panel visualization to the web. Built on the same concepts as the Karabo GUI, which stores operator panels in a database using an SVG-based scene format, KIWI is a modern React [4] and TypeScript [5] application that renders operator panels directly in the browser, including on mobile and tablet devices. This enables new workflows through platform-independent access without local installation, reducing deployment overhead while improving accessibility, portability, and scalability across teams. This contribution presents the motivation, architecture, current status, and lessons learned from the development of KIWI.

References
[1] S. Hauf et al., "The Karabo distributed control system," Journal of Synchrotron Radiation 26(5), 1448–1461, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600577519006696
[2] Python Documentation. https://docs.python.org/3/
[3] Qt Framework. https://www.qt.io/
[4] React. https://react.dev/
[5] TypeScript Documentation. https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/