Hi all,
At the company I work for we are just starting a project to produce
visualization software for the European Space Agency (ESA). This is going
to be a sponsored open-source project so (naturally...) I'm looking at
OpenDX to see if it addresses our needs. OpenDX seems to be a great tool
but I've only been looking at it for a few days so I haven't delved in too
deep yet.
Our primary focus will be the processing of geographic/atmospheric data
coming from the Envisat (to be launched sometime in 2002); it has three
instruments to collect atmospheric data (Sciamachy, Gomos, Mipas).
Furthermore, we will also be processing TOMS and GOME ozone data. Our goal
is to have a multi-purpose, extensible tool for scientists in the ozone /
atmospheric research area enabling them to analyze and compare the data
coming from all those instruments.
For our assesment the following questions are most important:
(1) how active is the user/developer community, with regard to things like
release frequency, bug report responses, and help with problems (I'll
be a newbie for months to come, and it sure would be nice to know that
there's a place to ask silly questions). Is OpenDX being used in any
real-life commercial/scientific setting at the moment?
(2) The 2D 'plot' facility seems rather limited in scope. I haven't been
looking into the source code, but my guess is that we'd have to write
a module providing somewhat fancier plots. Would this be difficult?
I'm quite experienced at C-programming but I have no experience with
X/Motif programming.
(3) is it possible to get OpenDX running well on a Win32-based OS?
Using Linux, opendx works like a charm for me, but my mileage on
several win32 machines (win98, win2000, using exceed) seems to vary.
For example, I can't get opendx to use hardware 3D rendering although
I installed Exceed3D.
(4) are any efforts under way to provide native win32 graphics support
(...probably not, but just checking...)
(5) there seem to be several add-on packages that provide mapping of
geographical data onto a spherical earth; is any of those actively
maintained?
(6) Concerning licensing: my guess is that there cannot be a problem if
we release our software as an "add-on" package to opendx (or even
as a set of patches to the original, if the need would arise).
Am I correct in assuming that?
(7) How does OpenDX compare to other open source visualization packages?
The only viable alternative I know of would be to use the Visual
Toolkit (VTK), are there any others? Why should we use OpenDX (or why
not?)
Any info would be greatly appreciated!
Regards,
Sidney Cadot
Science [&] Technology
Delft, Netherlands
