Bringing a control system to the web - a middle layer control system bridge service

The European X-ray Free Electron Laser Project (XFEL), to be built at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, will have a highly complex system for data acquisition and control. To allow access to the low level, embedded subsystems of the accelerator by high level applications (e.g. web browsers), we have developed a facade based architecture serving as an interface service, which acts as a bridge between the native DOOCS (distributed object oriented control system) communication layers and the web service oriented world. The aim of the first stage of the project is to show that such a gateway between the classical hardware oriented control system architecture and the modern service oriented web technologies is not only possible but also offers new ways for configuring and managing the huge amount of hardware components of this unique facility. The architectural layout of this novel integration between two such opposed worlds together with the first performance results will be presented.