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tau is a library for connecting client side applications (CLIs and GUIs) to Tango device servers. Tau is built on top of PyTango which is a python binding for the Tango library. It provides an abstraction layer that allows Tango to be accessed in a pythonic, object oriented way. For the GUI part, tau is built on top of the graphical library PyQt which is a python binding for Qt.
Therefore, throughout the documentation we will assume that you have a basic knowledge of Tango/PyTango and Qt/PyQt.
Although tau is written primarily in pure python, it makes heavy use of PyTango, numpy, Qub, PyQt and PyQwt to provide good performance even when large amounts of data are involved.
tau is designed with the philosophy that you should be able to create simple applications that are able to connect to tango servers with just a few lines of code or even with no code at all!
The concepts were not born from scratch. It is not our intention to reinvent the way applications are written. Many of the concepts were borrowed from the existing java tango library called ATK. If you have used ATK before you will find many concepts familiar.
The tau library is divided into two parts: the core module which handles all interaction with PyTango (tau core tutorial) and the widget module which provides a collection of widgets that can be used inside any PyQt based GUI (tau widget tutorial).