TOPCAT & STIL new releases

[Mark Taylor]

Dear VO people,

This message is to announce new releases of the table manipulation
tool TOPCAT and the table access library STIL which underlies it.

   TOPCAT v1.4:  http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   STIL v2.1:    http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/

The main new feature visible in TOPCAT (derived from STIL) is that 
graphical table load dialogues have been generalised to permit 
acquisition of tables from more interesting places than local disk.
Load dialogues currently supplied include:

    - Cone search services (list of services got from registry)
    - Registry queries (retrieve the result of a query as a table)
    - MySpace browsing
    - Treeview-like browsing of local or remote filesystems

Coming soon, probably, an SRB browser too (is anyone interested in this?)
The pluggable architecture also allows you to supply your own custom 
load dialogues at runtime by implementing a fairly simple interface.

Other new features include:

   - STIL can now write tables to streams, not just files
   - Explode Array Column button in TOPCAT to split up vector-valued columns
   - More comprehensive output of topcat -help
   - Bugfix in VOTable output namespace declaration
   - Workaround for VOTable FIELD elements with missing arraysize attribute

See the URLs above for full lists of changes, screenshots, documentation,
downloads, etc.

Mark

-- 
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/