Soft instrumentation: a review

A number of software packages are now available to aid in the generation of data acquisition and control applications. Just as spreadsheets are tools which help in the manipulation and presentation of data, so the software reviewed in the paper consist of tools for generating applications. While the details of how the packages work vary from one to another, they do have two common features. Firstly they have a graphical editor which allows one to generate panels (screens), which the user will interact with as the application is progressing, and secondly they have an application editor for specifying what processing is to take place in an application and when it is to do so