Speaker
Description
DESY accelerator and beamline GUI applications have evolved over many years and now cover a mix of technologies.
These technologies range from older Windows ActiveX, to .NET, Java-, and Python-based, as well as modern web frameworks like React, with specific cases of using LabView and MATLAB GUI tools.
Some of these solutions depend on proprietary software or heavyweight runtimes such as the JVM or .NET, which can complicate long-term maintenance and deployment.
Recent Rust-based frameworks such as Tauri 2 provide a lightweight approach for combining native desktop applications with modern web technologies. This makes it possible to reuse existing web-based user interfaces and gives access to the large ecosystem of open-source web UI component libraries.
In this contribution, we present our experience migrating legacy DESY GUI applications to a hybrid desktop architecture based on Tauri 2. We discuss the overall application structure, integration with existing control-system infrastructure, packaging and deployment on different platforms, and interoperability with legacy components. We also compare this approach with existing Java-based solutions in terms of runtime footprint, startup behavior, and maintainability.
