Patrick Craig > IRIS Explorer
Patrick's IRIS Explorer Web Pages
The information on these web pages just relates to the work I have done on IRIS Explorer.
For more complete information see the IRIS Explorer homepage (link at the bottom of this page).
I began working for NAG (Oxford, UK) in October 1996. I was employed to work on a European Union
funded project that involved writing a new suite of IRIS Explorer modules.
In May 1998 I began working on the IRIS Explorer system. I implemented a couple
of new features for version 4.0, wires coloured by datatype, runtime licensing
and the MasterSuite API functions (by incorporating code from the CERN hepExplorer
library). The first IRIS Explorer 4.0 ports were released at the end of 1998.
I spent most of 1999 and the first few months of 2000 working on version 5.0
of IRIS Explorer on NT. From April 1999 I was working for NAG Japan.
I implemented several new features
for version 5.0. An internal beta version of version 5.0 on NT was made available
at the end of March 2000. I spent the next 4 months implementing the non-NT specific
features on unix (Linux). During this time I also implemented the shared memory arena on
Linux and got the Fortran API to work on Linux.
In September 2000, it was found that the control panel widget library used
in version 4.0 didn't work with the latest compilers on some machines, in
particular IBM. The widget library was a very complicated affair that used
user-defined widget classes. This library also caused problems at version 4.0 on IBM and HP if you
used the "wrong" version of Motif, see this
external link. I rewrote this library to use standard Xt/Motif widget classes.
The widget library also contained the infamous control panel layout algorithm
used prior to version 5.0 on unix. This was never used on NT as non-resizeable
widgets were never implemented on NT, so a very simple layout algorithm could
be used. When I rewrote the widget library on unix, I didn't see much point in
re-implementing a layout algorithm that didn't work properly, so I devised and
implemented a new control panel layout algorithm.
I ported this algorithm to NT and implemented non-resizeable widgets on NT.
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IRIS Explorer 5.0 Control Panel Layout Algorithm
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