STILTS v3.0 release

[Mark Taylor]

Hi topcat/stilts users,

this is to announce a new major release of STILTS, v3.0,
available as usual from:

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

This release comes with an update release of the table I/O library
STIL (v3.0-7), but there is no accompanying TOPCAT release.

The major new functionality is that all the new-style
plotting functions from topcat (as introduced in topcat v4)
are now available from stilts and can be scripted.  
There is a new section of the user document to explain it all, 
here:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/plot2.html

There is also a new section on invoking stilts tasks programmatically
from third-party code, here:

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

Part of the motivation for these two enhancements was to allow
use of the topcat/stilts plotting library from external GUI
applications, since the library can be used to generate high-performance
JComponents which are interactive (you can resize the windows, navigate
around them with the mouse, etc).
If you're interested in embedding this visualisation library in
your application, I'm interested to hear about it and willing to 
advise/help.

Any feedback very welcome as always.

These features are a little bit experimental, so there may be
some rough edges; please contact me either direct or on the
topcat-user at bristol.ac.uk mailing list with any questions,
bug reports etc.

Best wishes,

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/