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Computing for Science

The Computing for Science (CS) group supports ILL scientists, students and visitors in a number of activities including data analysis, instrument simulation and sample simulation.

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Filing and PkFit - History

1979 - Early versions

The original PkFit is due to Peter H.C. Hullah (1979). It has been modified by one of the ILL-chaots in July 1986 and was installed on the ILL VAX-VMS server DIVA in February 1987 by Paul Frings.


1995 - The TAS package for Mac OS 7 to 9

Filing, PkFit and ResCal for Mac OS 7 to 9 were developed in the years 1990 using Language System FORTRAN and then Absoft FORTRAN compilers. The old sources was converted to FORTRAN 77 and substantially improved. New features were added, e.g. 1D/4D resolution calculation, user defined peak functions, etc.
A human interface was designed using APIs from the Apple toolbox. It was fully developed in FORTRAN which was quite a tour de force. The program used the buggy and rudimentary TSIgraphics graphic library for plots.
Ref.: "User’s Manual of PkFit", A.Bouvet and A.Filhol (1995) Technical report ILL95BO15T, Institut Laue-langevin, France.

1997 - The original Unix and VMS version

These relied on the X11 graphic library PGplot for both plots and the human interface. This resulted in a quite ugly interface and not so easy to use.
A. Bouvet and A. Filhol (1997) Technical report ILL97BO03T, Institut Laue-langevin, France.

2003 - Port to Mac OS X with a genuine Mac OS X interface

The Mac OS classic version of the program was successfully used until 2003. At this date, an incompatibilty with Mac OS classic appeared resulting in crashes in the old TSIgraphics library with counting larger than 10000.
Unfortunately, switching from Mac OS classic to Mac OS X was not a mere recompilation of the existing code. The new APIs of Mac OS X are substantially different from the old ones and programming them with FORTRAN turned out to be tricky. Furthermore the dead TSIgraphics library (source code not available) had to be replaced.
An unsuccessful port was made with the help of the Junior-enterprise N'Sigma. It used PLplot for plotting and Mac OS X API's for the GUI but FORTRAN is definitely not suitable for calling object oriented APIs!

2007 - Interim Mac OS X version based on PGplot

PkFit v3 is a quick and dirty port to Mac OS X based on the old Unix version of PkFit. The Mac OS X implementation of PGplot adds a native Aqua interface allowing pictures to be easily cut and pasted into other applications. Note that we used our own version of PGplot correcting some bugs in the interactivity routines.

2008 - Mac OS X version based on Winteracter

PkFit & Filing v4 now exhibit a fully redesigned human interface based on Winteracter. The later is a multi-platform FORTRAN 9x GUI toolset which makes it possible to design event driven interfaces. Both the Unix and Mac OS X versions of Winteracter are based on X11 and OpenMotif while the Windows version is based on Windows APIs.
Note that Winteracter implements its own menubar in the plot window.