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IRAF Update (1Mar94)
(from CCS, NOAO Newsletter No. 37, 1 March 1994)

Most of the effort of the IRAF group this past quarter continued to be
directed to development of the new graphical user interface (GUI)
software for IRAF, including xgterm and ximtool, in anticipation of the
next projected public release of IRAF in spring 1994.  The last issue
of this Newsletter went into detail about this work and what is being
developed.

Alpha testing of a major part of what we have been calling the IRAF
Mail Network began in January.  Beta testing of this new facility by
our list of beta test sites will begin shortly.  The IRAF Mail Network
consists of many interrelated network services, including those
services that are in heavy use today such as the FTP archive, the IRAF
Hotline, and the IRAF sitemail, plus a number of new services such as
network news, a World Wide Web server, a Mosaic interface, and a scheme
for remotely executing IRAF over the network.  Because of the many
diversified services perhaps a better name for this project would be
the IRAF Information Network.

The new network service that just went into operation is a USENET and
e-mail based network news facility.  This consists of a collection of
newsgroups organized as a USENET alternate news hierarchy called adass,
after the software conference of the same name (astronomical data
analysis software and systems).  Although our main interest in
developing this was to have a place to put some IRAF newsgroups, we
named the new news hierarchy adass in case there is any interest in
expanding this in the future to include other non-IRAF astronomy
software newsgroups.  Existing alternate news hierarchies comparable to
adass are bionet (for the biological sciences community) and gnu (the
Gnu software).

The advantage of an alternate news hierarchy is that it is easier to
target the desired community, in our case the astronomical community.
The disadvantage of starting a new news hierarchy is that initially
there is no distribution system in place.  To carry the newsgroups
locally a site must get a feed from some other site.  To read or post
news, an individual need only have some NNTP-based newsreader software
and access to an NNTP (network news) server somewhere on the net which
carries the desired newsgroups and which permits the user to read and
post news. As part of the mail network project we will be providing an
NNTP server on the main IRAF server iraf.noao.edu which will allow
anyone to read and post to the adass newsgroups (but only to those
newsgroups).

The current list of newsgroups are the following (this may change):

adass.general            important announcements
adass.misc               miscellaneous discussion
adass.admin              adass newsgroup administration
adass.test               test postings

adass.conference         adass software conference

adass.iraf.readme        the mail network README file
adass.iraf.announce      new iraf software or facilities
adass.iraf.applications  applications discussion group
adass.iraf.programming   programming discussion group
adass.iraf.system        system issues, system administration
adass.iraf.misc          miscellaneous discussion
adass.iraf.buglog        project buglogs (computer generated)
adass.iraf.sources       small programs or documents

The adass.iraf newsgroups are intended to be shared by the IRAF user
community and all the groups and individuals developing software for
IRAF (i.e., not just the NOAO IRAF group).  The next issue of the IRAF
Newsletter will have more detailed information on the IRAF Mail
Network, including information on how to subscribe to or otherwise
access the new facilities.  Individuals interested in helping beta test
the netnews facility should contact the IRAF group.

A Frequently-Asked-Questions (FAQ) list is being developed and should
be available shortly in our FTP archive.  FAQ lists serve two purposes:
they help users solve immediate problems, and they also serve as a
learning tool since users can read through the FAQ list and learn
things that they might not otherwise find out about.

In addition to developing the GUI system facilities (xgterm, ximtool,
and the GUI toolkit) we are experimenting with a number of new IRAF
applications (IRAF tasks) with integrated GUIs.  These applications
have a full graphical user interface using multiple windows, pop down
menus, command buttons, scrolling lists, etc., plus custom facilities
for interactive graphics and imaging.  Early versions of these new
GUI-based applications have been demonstrated at recent astronomical
conferences (see below).

These demonstration GUIs include an image browser that allows the user
to browse directories and select images, then list the image header or
display the image; a radial velocity GUI built as a front end to the
radial velocity task FXCOR; a spectroscopic tool that combines features
of SPLOT and SPECPLOT into a powerful GUI for spectroscopic data
analysis; a GUI for click and point aperture photometry, using graphics
markers to mark on the displayed image the region in which photometry
is to be done; and a help tool that provides the user with a graphical
interface to the IRAF online help system.  These GUI tasks, plus
others, will eventually be packaged as an addon package (to the next
IRAF release) to give our users a chance to experiment with them.

The IRAF Users' Committee (IUC) met in Tucson in early December, and
the new GUI software, including xgterm, ximtool and the developmental
GUI-based science applications, were demonstrated to them.  The
committee was excited about this new development and was anxious to see
the new software released to the user community.  The IUC met for one
day; presentations by the IRAF group were made to the committee, and
priorities for future development were discussed.  The IUC's report is
presented as a separate article elsewhere in this Newsletter.

Members of the IRAF group attended the AAS meeting in Washington DC in
early January and demonstrated the new IRAF software and talked with
many of our users in the astronomical community.  The demonstrations of
the new software were well received and again users are anxious for the
new release of IRAF and the eventual availability of the GUI software.
We enjoyed meeting and talking with our users at this meeting, and we
thank the many of you who stopped by our booth.  For further
information about the IRAF project, please contact Jeannette Barnes,
Central Computer Services.

Doug Tody, Jeannette Barnes

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