Scientific software on the Eclipse Platform is common and wide-spread. Because The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a feature rich and productive environment many science organizations have picked it up and run with it, today lots of functional applications exist in this sector. The architecture of RCP means that much of the user interface can be interchanged and is inter-operable to some extent. So for instance a science project wanting to support Python can add the Pydev feature to its product and extend functionality quickly for little cost. When it comes to inter-operable algorithms and inter-operable plotting however, this is not the case: each science project has its own definitions. This means that they cannot profit from others work or make serendipitous discoveries with an unexpectedly useful tool. The DAWNSci project is one option for solving these issues.
The DAWNSci project defines Java interfaces for data description, plotting and plot tools, data slicing and file loading. It defines an architecture oriented around OSGi services to do this. It provides a reference implementation and examples for the interfaces.
This project provides features to allow scientific software to be inter-operable. Algorithms exist today which could be shared between existing Eclipse-based applications however in practice they describe data and do plotting using specific APIs which are not inter-operable or interchangeable. This project defines a structure to make this a thing of the past. It defines an inter-operable layer upon which to build RCP applications such that your user interface, data or plotting can be reused by others.
The Eclipse Foundation is the right place to collaborate for DAWNSci because of the Science Working Group. This group has attracted several universities and software companies. The Eclipse Foundation gives the most opportunity for discovering new projects that DAWNSci can make use of and add value to the scientists working at or visiting Diamond and the ESRF.
We have skimmed over the initial contribution with Sharon. The DAWN collaboration will be adding a collaboration agreement for committers, http://www.dawnsci.org/collaborate (still in progress). Previous committers will have to fill out a question set which will be sent around our mail list DAWN-DEV@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
The DAWN software will have releases scheduled with the shutdown phases of Diamond Synchrotron. The sub-components which are part of the dawn Eclipse project, DAWNSci , will be going through the same cycle. The releases are maintained by Diamond Light Source and are not on the Eclipse web site.
Implementations of:
1. Data description (numpy like layer)
2. Plotting (based on nebula and in-house)
3. Plot tools
4. Slicing
5. File loading including HDF5
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Initial contribution
The initial contribution is actually in the repo dawn-eclipse and the plugins start with org.eclipse.dawnsci.