[Nexus-developers] SWIG NeXus interface

[Ray Osborn]

On 2002/11/20 7:37, "Mark Koennecke" <Mark.Koennecke at psi.ch> wrote:

> 
> High,
> 
> at the recent NOBUGS meeting I presented a NeXus interface for SWIG
> which allows to interface NeXus to many scripting languages through
> a software tool called SWIG (http://www.swig.org). My question: how
> do we publish this? I suggest to put this code into the NeXus-API
> distribution.  It should never go into the autoconf bit though,
> otherwise a sheer unlimited amount of complexity arises.
> 

Hi Mark,
I think that it would be helpful for the other developers to try it out
before we release it to the public.  I played around with SWIG, and soon
realized that it raises a number of issues, e.g., Python seemed to require
the NXhandle pointer to be initialized as a null pointer before the first
call to NXopen.  I don't know if you have solved all those problems, but I
would like to see what you've done and then discuss how the user will want
to use it. Why don't you add a swig directory to the CVS server?

I am not experienced in setting up an autoconf installation, but I think we
need to have a base installation as default, with other facilities added as
options in the configure script.  For example, not everyone needs jnexus so
make that an option.  What is considered to be standard and what optional is
something we should debate.  How about:

Standard
--------
C + F77 API, test programs, NXbrowse, NXto...

Optional
--------
F90 API, Jnexus, NXdict, NDS (not currently on CVS server)

Regards,
Ray
-- 
Dr Ray Osborn                Tel: +1 (630) 252-9011
Materials Science Division   Fax: +1 (630) 252-7777
Argonne National Laboratory  E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov
Argonne, IL 60439-4845