Many thanks to Lloydt and Sharon Cady for their valuable information. > Loyd made a lot of good points, but in my opinion it all boils down to whether > or not you need to do any 3-d or "classical" visualizations. For this, DX wins > hands down. But for standard array imaging operations, it is sort of senseless > to use DX. All that extra capability sort of weighs you down. In this regard, > IDL is very simple to use.
In the past we had very little 3-d visualizations but it will increase in the near future; that is one reason why we want to replace our own graphics program with one that already support these features. Another reason is the wish of the users to "edit" the graphics output (I mean rotation of 3-d objects, rescaling of 2d-graphics, zooming, labelling, etc.). > I'm not a computer system person, so I can't tell you much about the > advantages/differences in that regard, but I can say that from the amount of > traffic that goes through this news group, there are plenty of installation > difficulties that people run into with OpenDx. Yes, I made this experience too (I failed to install it on our HP/Convex (HP-UX 10.01) and HP N-Class (HP-UX 11.00) in an acceptable amount of time; on a Linux PC (SuSE 6.3) the installation was probably not correct, it works almost, but there are some features that don't work corretly). > Plus, the "Open" part of OpenDX > is fairly new, and I get the impression that there are still a few kinks to > work out. You might want to keep that in mind if you or your company is > already > familiar with IDL, but know nothing about DX. We have not yet very much experience with IDL; the colleague who has investigated some commercial graphic systems and will do most of the programming (adatption to our programs and emulation of our old graphics system) has worked with IDL for 3 or 4 weeks; and there are 2 or 3 users who have pior experience with IDL. But we know nothing about DX. The decision was almost already made last week in favour of IDL when I proposed to include DX in the list of alternatives. I'm generally in favour of Open Source and I'm also impressed by the capabilities of DX (the comapison of Lloyd war very instructive); but the colleague who investigated IDL thinks that IDL will suffice for our needs and I think that those who will made the final decission (next week or so) will focus on the easier use of IDL; also the remark of Sharon > IDL is also much more flexible with regard to hard copy output. ... is rather important for them; I just thought I hadn't learnt enough of DX to do the same things as my colleague with IDL; in a first step they want to emulate our old graphic system with the new one so that all old graphics look _exactly_ the same as they are used to see them; a point which I personally find rather unimportant.
