TOPCAT/STILTS release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear TOPCAT/STILTS users,

this is to announce the following releases:

   TOPCAT v3.5-2
   STILTS v2.1-2

You can find downloads at the usual places:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Headline items are:

   JyStilts:
      You can now invoke STILTS commands from Jython as an alternative
      to the Unix/DOS command line.  This seems to work well, but is
      somewhat experimental - feedback is encouraged.  See

         http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/jystilts.html

   Crossmatching enhancements:
      Scalability and performance have been improved for the STILTS
      and TOPCAT crossmatching functions.  Quantitative differences
      depend on detailed requirements, but maximum table size increases
      of a factor of 5 and CPU time decreases of a factor of 3 are
      typical; ten million is now a ballpark figure for the number
      of rows you can match in a reasonable amount of memory.
      If you have crossmatching requirements which are still out of
      the scope of this software, I'd be interested to talk to you.
    
These releases also contain quite a number of smaller performance and
functionality enhancements and bug fixes.  For details, see the
full version histories:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html

Many thanks to all of you who have contributed feedback, bug reports,
feature requests, test data etc to assist with these improvements.

Comments, questions, feedback are welcome on the topcat-user mailing
list or to me direct.

Mark

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