Gophers on a Plane: Flying golang on aircraft for science

Date and Time: 
2017 May 25th at 3pm
Location: 
ML main seminar
Speaker: 
Nick Potts

The NCAR community generally uses only a very tiny subset of the myriads of computer programming languages that currently exist, the bulk of the work being done in FORTRAN, Java, C, C++, R, and Python. This presentation functions as a brief introduction to Go/Golang which has been recently invented by Google; and demonstrates how NCAR/EOL has been utilizing it to rewrite a twenty year old custom instrument data logger into a RESTful HTTP service, highlighting some benefits in using a modern web-aware language. Presentation covers enough details of the instrument hardware and software architecture to show how Go’s language features map to instrument control, how Golang is simplifying software testing and maintenance, and the ease of deploying Golang to the instrument’s
user community. Presentation will include considerations and tradeoffs when designing and implementing a REST API for instrumentation and some resources for others interested in using Golang in a scientific context.

Keywords: Go, Golang, REST API, HTTP, AVAPS, Instrument Development

Speaker Description: 

Nick Potts has been working in EOL since 2008, at the border between hardware and software. He is currently member of the in-situ Sensing Facility.

Video recorded: 

See https://github.com/NCAR/go-example for slides and code examples presented in this talk

Event Category: