Project description

The first version of the ANA/AVE/ROD programs was developed by Elias Vlieg in the beginning of the 1990s. The programs were originally destined for PCs with MS-DOS. The commercial package GraphiC was used for plotting curves. The user interface was based on ASCII terminals with menu-driven selections and some command-line editing features.

Elias made the source code available for anyone interested. This had the result that parallel developments were started in a number of different labs and facilities, e.g. at BNL and Daresbury. Paul Howes ported the code to UNIX, changed the plotting routine to use the PGPLOT graphic library and changed the menu routines to use the GNU readline library.

In 1999 Detlef Smilgies, who used ANA/ROD but needed additional and new analysis features, started a development project at the ESRF with the collaboration of. Olof Svensson and Rainer Wilcke. The starting point of the project was the then most recent version from Elias Vlieg with the modifications by Paul Howes. During the development, additional contributions were integrated from Mikaël Doré, Odile Robach, Marie-Claire Saint-Lager and Chris Walker.

The following list presents the achievements during the project development phase:

• CVS is used for the source code and version management of ANA-ROD.
• The GNU gcc compiler was chosen for compiling the sources. This compiler is freeware and is available on practically all platforms. For MS Windows, it is part of the CYGWIN package.
• The PGPLOT graphics library has replaced the GraphiC library. It has drivers for many graphical devices, e.g. X-Windows and PostScript. Under MS Windows, a graphics device is provided by GrWin.
• The NCURSES library is used for command-line editing.
• Two distributions have been created, one "standard" that will be kept identical to the latest developments by Elias Vlieg, and one "extended" that implements new features.
• For more details about the features that were incorporated in ANA-ROD, both during the development phase and later on, see the pages on the standard and the extended versions.