Evaluation of GUI technologies for CERN's Beam Interlock System

Abstract: This thesis presents an evaluation of various graphical user interface (GUI) technologies for use in the supervision software of CERN’s Beam Interlock System (BIS). The evaluation is necessary because the current GUItechnology used by the supervision software, JavaFX, is no longer supported by Oracle. It also relies on aninternal library that is no longer maintained. Furthermore, a second version of the BIS is being developed, anda GUI is needed that works with BIS and BIS2 in parallel.Which technology is most suitable for the next version of the BIS supervision GUI?This question was answered by gathering user stories from users and experts. Simple proof of concepts weredeveloped for each technology, in order to identify technical limitations and register the development time. Theuser stories relevant to the choice of technology were listed, and each technology received points depending onwhether they were able to fulfill the requirement or not.Furthermore, in order to evaluate the ease of use, wireframes were created based on some of the user stories.These were qualitatively evaluated with stakeholders, which produced feedback that may be used for furtherdevelopment.Out of the four technologies evaluated, PyQt scored 6, ACW scored 4, WRAP scored 6 and Grafana scored3. WRAP and Grafana were discarded as viable options, since they were not able to fulfill hard requirements.ACW scored lower because it is web based and comes with a bigger maintenance overhead.