AIDA

AIDA is an ongoing project to define a set of common interfaces for data analysis and visualisation. Anaphe is part of this project, along with JAS, OpenScientist and others. There are two advantages to this approach. Firstly, users do not have to learn different commands for each tool, increasing efficiency and bringing together communities from different experiments and environments to share experience and code. Secondly, a fully component-based framework (like Lizard) allows the user to 'plug in' components from any package, so if they offer the same interface the user can choose at run-time which particular 'bits' to use. Such flexibility is a great help in a long term project like the LHC. An illustration of this flexibility was the recent demonstration of full inter-operability of AIDA-compliant components written in different languages (Java and C++).

Important Changes to Anaphe

Anaphe was already partially written when the AIDA project was started, so we already had our own interfaces. Anaphe 3.6.6 (February 2002) and earlier versions implemented only these, but since Anaphe 4.0.1 (April 2002) we have implementations of the AIDA 2.2 interfaces too. It must be emphasised that the AIDA interfaces are evolving and thus less stable than the old Anaphe interfaces. If you want a more stable, more functional tool you should use 3.6.6. However, we have decided not to continue development of this branch. The old interfaces and wrapper layer are basically frozen. The foundation libraries will of course continue to develop, but the future is AIDA and we want to concentrate our limited manpower on producing fully functional, performant, stable wrappers for the AIDA 2.x interfaces, and a Lizard to match.

There is a workshop on AIDA coming up in June 2002 - see here for details. You are very welcome to attend some or all of the sessions. We expect the outcome of this workshop to be a full set of user- and developer-level interfaces which will restore all of the functionality of the Anaphe foundation libraries inside Lizard and also at the C++ library level. We will then work very hard to produce a new version of the wrappers and Lizard as soon as possible.