[Nexus] NeXus News

[Mark Koennecke]

Hello,

as some of you might know the NeXus technical subcommittee and 
especially Pete
Jemian have invested a lot of work to update the NeXus manual in the 
last year.
It is now current and much better then it used to be. In this work we 
arrived
at a major milestone on our last code camp in chicago, october 20 - 22. Now
the NeXus WWW site has received a new front page and its content is created
from the NeXus manual. Though not all of it looking as beautiful as it 
could be,
at least the content is correct and up to data.

Another good news is that we had some discussions with the detector 
manufacturer
Dectris. They do the Mythen, Pilatus and Eiger detectors. With the Eiger 
detector they
will start writing HDF-5 files with NeXus conventions. The programming 
model will be that
Dectris writes the detector data and the local DAQ system adds further 
meta data to
the HDF-5 NeXus file. In order to support this, some more fields have 
been added
to NXdetector.

Other things which we addressed during the code camp:
- For HDF-5 all dimensions can now be unlimited

- NAPI was moved from HDF-5 1.6 to HDF-5 1.8 which is now current. 
Support for
  HDF-5 1.6 was stopped two years ago.

- A set of additional API functions was defined which allow to use 64 
bit integers for the
  dimensions.

- Some more manual work was done: there will be examples how to write 
NeXus files
  with the HDF-5 API alone soon. A new manual, NeXus for the Impatient, 
is in  progress.
  This is a short introduction to NeXus in about 10 pages.

- Some more work was done to integrate Ray Osborns tree python API and 
to write more
  tests for the python interface.

- Some progress was made on axis dependency encoding

- We will gradually move from autotools to cmake for the NeXus API.

- We had some discussions on a new C++ tree API to be written by Eugen 
Wintersberger, on
  a parallel HDF driver for NeXus, and a possible move to sphinx for the 
NeXus manual.

All in all we managed to put a man months of work into NeXus between the 
seven of
us who attended the code camp. Many thanks to everyone who participated 
and to Pete
Jemian who did a wonderful job as a local organiser.

We are in good hope that a new version of the NeXus-API will be released 
before the
end of this year. We also strive to release a 1.0 release of the NeXus 
application
definitions by then.

Best Regards,

              Mark Koennecke