Chromatography software data system for Linux

This article is obsolete. See the current project Stage at UniChrom for Linux Page

Introduction

The Linux operating system is cool either for server as desktop applications. Due to growing interest to scientific application for Linux, we were planned to develop a branch of our UniChrom Data System for this operating system. Since our main product are nearly all developed in Borland Delphi, the Linux development way was the only one, but pretty light - migrate the application to Borland Kylix.

Researching the UniChrom site statistics we found that the most interest to Linux Chromatography Stations are in German Scientific Institution. Wellknown Linux Distributions were come for Germany (SuSE for instance). So mainly this article is intended for those reader. If I would know German better, this article would be in Deutch.

Technical Issues

Since the UniChrom fro Windows was developed as entirely VCL application (VCL - visual component library implemented for Windows), the migration is possible after rewrite the application in with platform independent visual components - CLX (Borland visual components suite built upon wellknown platform independent graphic library Qt).

The implementation of Borland Kylix limits the usage of this compiler to x86 computers only, but it is not a problem, because of client server architecture of Linux either as UniChrom too. The examples of distributed Instrumental environment are described here.

After looking through the UniChrom code it was found that nearly 60% of code lines are platform independent at all. About 10% of code can be made platform independent by moving to Borland runtime functions instead of using Windows API calls. Borland is going to "standardise" Delphi RTL, so the set of runtime function are identical for Linux and Windows. The remaining 40% of code are - 10% on UniChrom asynchronous graphic engine and 30% the UniChrom drivers. The UniChrom graphic engine uses 2 threads pear each chromatogram window and migration to Borland standard class library can made this code platform independent.

The remaining problems - the UniChrom Chromatograph drivers - real hardware working and so on. We decided to open the specification of UniChrom drivers to Net community. The best support for drivers are from the people who most interested in their work. UniChrom driver specification with samples in C and in Pascal named "UniChrom DDK" is available for download. The instruments with proprietary protocols we have to migrate by our hands.