Note: this is the on-line version of the Introduction to the Python port
of GILDAS.
A PDF version
is also available.
The size of the datasets produced by the IRAM instruments experience a
tremendeous increase (because of multi-beam receivers, wide bandwidth
receivers, spectrometers with thousands of channels, and/or new
observing mode like the interferometric on-the-fly). Visualizing these
datasets in a fluent way is a challenge, which requires the best use
of the available hardware and operating systems (multi-cores
processors and multi-window environments). This prompted a large
rewriting of the part of the GILDAS kernel (known as GTV) in charge of
the interface between the plotting facilities and the system. The main
guidelines of this rewriting were 1) the backward compatibility when
possible, 2) the use of modern standards as the multi-threading or the
GTK+ toolkit, 3) the factorization of the source code for different OS
(Linux, Mac OSX and MS Windows), 4) the implementation of new
facilities like a PNG output or an interactive lens. This document
thoroughly describes the improvements for the end-users and the programmers.
Keywords: multithreading, multiwindowing, the GIMP ToolKit (GTK+),
Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
Related documents: GreG documentation, Programming in GILDAS
, E. Reynier