TOPCAT/STIL new releases

[Mark Taylor]

I'd like to announce a couple of relevant software releases.


TOPCAT V1.3
===========

A new release of TOPCAT (v1.3) is available as of today.  Notable new
features (among many others) are:

   - Full VOTable 1.1/1.0 support
   - Comma-Separated Value format support
   - Performance and scalability improvements (now happy with
        ~10^6 rows x ~10^2 columns even on quite modest platforms)
   - More and better-documented functions for algebraic expressions
   - 'Activation actions' introduced - e.g. clicking a point/row can
        trigger display of a sky cutout image
   - Graphical row subset selection using non-rectangular regions in plot
   - Crossmatching improved (faster, more match types, more information)
   - Can now choose RA/Dec units for matching (not forced to use radians)
   - You can finally flip X/Y plot axes!


STIL V2.0
=========

STIL, the Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library, which provides
TOPCAT with its table (including VOTable) handling capabilities,
has an accompanying new release, v2.0.

Notable new STIL features are:

   - Full VOTable 1.1/1.0 support (now including ID/ref crossreferencing)
   - VOTable parse gives you a true DOM (implements org.w3c.dom), but
        parse streams table data to a separate destination, so DOM is
        small even for large tables
   - Runtime configuration option allows you to select disk rather than 
        memory backing store for large tables (no more OutOfMemoryErrors)
   - Now works with J2SE 1.5/5.0 as well as 1.4.

As far as I know, STIL is still the _only_ VOTable library which can read
(or write?) all the VOTable variants, namely TABLEDATA, BINARY and FITS.


Screenshots, documentation and the software itself (all GPL) is
available at

   http://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/
   http://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/stil/

For those of you going to ADASS, I will be discussing and demonstrating
both components at a focus group demo on Monday lunchtime (13:15, Aspen).

Mark

(aplogies to anyone who gets this on both the votable and the apps list)

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/