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The AIPS++ Display Library, or more properly the display package of AIPS++, is a sophisticated class library for static and interactive display of scientific - predominantly astronomical - data. The display package also includes an interface to Glish which is loaded on-demand into the glishtk client.1 The highest-level component of the package - the Viewer tool - is implemented as a set of Glish scripts, and is a genuine AIPS++ tool providing display services within the AIPS++ environment for many kinds of data.
The purpose of this document is firstly to give the reader a high-level outline of the Library - an outline not possible in the framework of the AIPS++ class documentation - and secondly to give practical advice on extending the package in a number of ways, for example to work with new display devices, to display new types of data, or to display existing types of data in new ways.
The initial design of the Display Library was made in 1996, taking ideas from the existing AIPS++ display application AipsView, and the ATNF's suite of visualisation tools. The objective was to adopt an object-oriented approach to visualisation so that:
In 1998, the Display Library design was extended to enable the construction of visualisation tools from Glish. Instead of using the AIPS++ Distributed Object (DO) system, the extension made use of the Glish proxy system, and the dynamic loading capabilities of the one existing Glish proxy - glishtk. The first Glish application created using this system - the viewer - is, nevertheless, a true AIPS++ tool which can be managed by the AIPS++ Tool Manager.