DRAMA2: DRAMA for the Modern Era

The DRAMA Environment provides an API for distributed instrument software development. It originated at the Anglo-Australian Observatory (now Australian Astronomical Observatory) in the early 1990s, in response to the need for a software environment for large distributed and heterogeneous systems, with some components requiring real-time performance. It was first used for the AAO's 2dF fibre positioner project (Lewis et al. 2002) for the Anglo-Australian Telescope. DRAMA is used for most AAO systems and is or has been used at various other observatories looking for a similar solution. Whilst DRAMA has evolved and many features were added, the overall design has not changed. It was still a largely C language based system, with some C++ wrappers. It did not provide good support for threading or exceptions. Ideas for proper thread support within DRAMA have been in development for some years, but C++11 has provided many features that allow a high quality implementation. We have taken the opportunity provided by C++11 to make significant changes to the DRAMA API, producing a modern and more reliable interface to DRAMA, known as DRAMA2.