Ivo C. Busko (Space Telescope Science Institute)
This work reports preliminary results of an ongoing experiment in software development being carried out by the Science Software Group at STScI. The goal is to evaluate the capabilities (and weaknesses) of Java as an environment for development of data visualization and analysis tools tailored for Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data.
The initial phase consists in building a simple interactive spectrum visualization tool. The objective is not as much the creation of a powerful tool that could be readily handed out to general users, but to develop instead a set of Java classes and interfaces embodying clear-cut object-oriented concepts, that could support both the initial visualization requirements as well as future data analysis enhancements.
Aside the object-oriented design problem, the biggest problem found in this project so far was the need to access HST data, which span a varied gamut of formats. Since HST data in all its forms can be readily accessed by IRAF/TABLES libraries, to save development time and to avoid current inefficiencies in Java I/O, we choose to link the Java code to the IRAF/TABLES libraries using the Java Native Interface.
In this poster we show the current status of the visualization tool, as well as a detailed description of the Java-IRAF interface.