Web interfaces to MDSplus data

The MDSplus Data Acquisition System has been used successfully on NSTX at PPPL since early 1999. While the X-Window-based tools supplied with MDSplus are powerful, and both the IDL programming language and the supplied TDI language are effective for complex and specialized analyses, some users prefer the convenience of applications that can be run in a Web browser. Web users do not need to know about X-Windows, or even have accounts or privileges on server computers. The MDSplots page reads MDSplus "Scope" setup files and plots MDSplus signals with overlays. It uses a Perl script to open a pipe to an IDL subprocess. The TreeSearch page provides several options for finding information in MDSplus trees. The MDSshots page lists shots where the maximum for a specified signal is above or below a specified value. A variety of information in an MS-SQL database is also accessible from a Web browser. These utilities could be used at other sites which keep data in MDSplus.