The Ultimate OPC Enabling Technology
Customer Testimonial
David Sheinberg (Germany)

I am a scientist in an experimental lab that studies brain mechanisms of visual perception. Basically, we run experiments by showing different things on video displays and having humans or animals respond in some way to what they see. During the course of the experiment, we measure behavior and brain activity. We use QNX to control the experiments.

I became interested in Gamma when I found out that there was integrated support for the PhAB widgets. Already we had a number of programs in the lab using Photon for displaying data, eye position of our subjects, the status of the experiment, etc. However, because multiple investigators are running a variety of experiments, there are project specific things that need to be monitored for different experiments. For offline analysis we have been using Tcl/Tk + some internal data analysis extensions. This has worked very well, but under QNX, running Tk for graphical apps is not ideal. However, we still have Tcl (8.0) running, along with our in-house extensions. My idea was to connect Tcl to Gamma, and use PhAB to build the display widgets. We then integrated a Qnx Send command into our Tcl shell, which sends messages to a Gamma shell that has loaded the PhAB widget. With just a couple of Tcl <-> Gamma commands, our users can access the Photon widget from Tcl, without even knowing that Gamma (or the underlying lisp interpreter) is doing the work...

So, to make a long story short, we use Gamma as very powerful glue to tie one scripting language that is common throughout the lab (Tcl) into Photon. Because y'all have done such a marvelous job with Gamma, we can access all this very easily. Changes are effortless, and require no compilation, and we retain the power of PhAB. Not a bad combination!
