STIL major release; TOPCAT & STILTS minor releases

[Mark Taylor]

There is a new major release of STIL, the java table I/O library,
with corresponding minor releases of TOPCAT and STILTS:

   STIL   v4.0
   STILTS v3.4
   TOPCAT v4.8

There are several backwardly incompatible changes in the STIL API,
which have been introduced to enable the following new functionality:

   - improved support for multithreaded/parallel processing of table data
   - guessing input file format from filenames
   - user configurability of I/O handlers
   - support for specifying input tables from non-bytestream sources

amongst other things.  If you use the STIL library in your
application code you should take a look at the changes listed in
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html
This STIL version is not yet available in a Maven repository
(a couple of older versions can be found at
https://bintray.com/opencadc/software/stil-io)
but I hope to make that happen in the forseeable future.

The new TOPCAT and STILTS releases make use of some of these features:

   - Some more operations run in parallel (statistics calculation,
     row sorting, STILTS tskymap) - these should be much faster for 
     large datasets on multicore machines.

   - You no longer have to tell TOPCAT/STILTS that (e.g.) a *.csv file
     is in CSV format!

   - I/O formats are configurable when loading/saving, giving more
     control over file format.

   - Some arbitrary sized test tables can be generated (fake source
     catalogues, strange attractors).

Details are in the usual places:

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

Any comments, questions, problems, please get in touch.
In particular I'm happy to advise on any issues relating to updating
application software to STIL v4.

Thanks!

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/