collaborative software
Peter Teuben (teuben@astro.umd.edu)
Thu, 12 Sep 1996 08:52:24 -0400
During the ADASS linux BoF last year Dave Mills (NOAO) showed us his
work on a 'Linux for Astronomy' CDROM, which he published later that
year. It is one example of a future direction software development
is going. A kind of "anarchistic" hotchpotch of software, with some
glue inbetween to make it easier for the uninitiated to get some
science done with it. I don't know how successfull his first CDROM
was in that respect, but it's certainly a well received first attempt.
A second CD is in the making I understand.
(CAVEAT: I'm biased since I contributed a minor piece of code to the
CDROM)
You can read more about LfA on:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rfactory/lfa.html
Dave Mill's work reminded to an earlier ADASS (3?) contribution about
DRACO, a collaborative environment which tries to keep the
underlying packages untouched and only knows how to interface
them and present them in a coherent way to the user. I haven't
heard much about DRACO recently though.
You can read more about DRACO on:
http://www.stsci.edu/~miller/draco/draco.html
Anyways, since no serious FADS discussion has started yet, I thought
I'd throw this in the open.
peter