Dear VOTablers,
this message is to announce the first public release (v1.0) of STIL - the Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library.
STIL is a pure Java (J2SE1.4) library for I/O and manipulation of tables
(focussed on, though not necessarily restricted to, astronomical data).
It is the library which underlies TOPCAT (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/).
Although it is format-neutral and can read/write tables in a number
of formats (including FITS, SQL, ASCII as well as VOTable),
it has powerful features for VOTable I/O.
Importantly (I believe this is a first for a generally available VOTable library) it can read/write VOTable documents using any of the defined serialization formats (TABLEDATA, BINARY, FITS) rather than just TABLEDATA. For reading, client software doesn't need to know or care which of these is used by a table it is looking at. For writing, it just needs to set an attribute of the output handler to decide which serialization format will be written.
By hybrid use of SAX and DOM it can permit full exploration of the hierarchical structure of input VOTable documents, or streaming reads for tables of arbitrary size.
Its format-neutral nature means that conversion between VOTable and other supported formats in either direction is trivial.
The STIL WWW page can be found at:
http://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/stil/
(it will probably be available from http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/ shortly).
This provides an overview, full javadocs, a tutorial user document
with examples, and downloads of class library and sources.
STIL is released under the GPL.
Any comments or feedback from the VOTable community would be most welcome.
Mark Taylor
-- Mark Taylor Starlink Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/Received on 2004-01-30Z16:10:51