Introducing the OpenGrADS Project

[Arlindo da Silva]

All,

   I'd to call your attention to the OpenGrADS Project, a complementary
effort to add extensions and new interfaces to GrADS. OpenGrADS is *not* an
alternative GrADS distribution, but rather a project designed to provide
"add-ons" to the main GrADS application developed and maintained by the
GrADS core team at COLA. Like GrADS, all OpenGrADS software is developed
under an open source model, mostly GPL. You can find out more OpenGrADS at
our home page and wiki:

   http://opengrads.org
   http://opengrads.org/wiki

New developers are always welcome. In particular we are seeking volunteers
for developing interfaces to Ruby and PHP similar to our Perl and Python
interfaces. Java programmers are also welcome for helping out extending our
Jython interface, or to develop a pure Java interface not involving Jython.
And the Perl/Python interfaces are far for complete.  If you have solid
programming skills in these areas and would like to volunteer your time
contact the developers by posting a message at our open-discussion forum:

   http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=547756

The Project Overview from our home page follows.

 Cheers!

      Arlindo

OpenGrADS Project Overview The power of GrADS stems from its easy of use,
speed and availability on a wide number of platforms. Traditionally, user
extensions have been possible by means of the GrADS scripting language, and
user defined functions. The OpenGrADS Project aims at improving GrADS
extensibility by

   - developing a framework for high performance *user defined commands*and
   *user defined functions*, allowing users to add their own dynamically
   linked plugins;
   - developing interfaces to modern scripting languages such as Perl and
   Python, as as well as to scientific tools such as IDL, Octave and Matlab, so
   that more powerful GrADS based applications can be developed and integrated
   into other existing community efforts;
   - establishing a central location for collaborative development of
   packages for GrADS, coordinating the development of extensions in critical
   areas;
   - providing a central repository of such extensions for the end-user.

The OpenGrADS Project <http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengrads/> intends
to complement the GrADS development going on at
COLA/IGES<http://grads.iges.org/grads/>,
although from time to time patches to COLA releases will be necessary to
enable the latest OpenGrADS extensions.

--
Arlindo da Silva
dasilva at alum.mit.edu
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