9.1 Version History

Releases to date have been as follows:

Version 0.3b (4 June 2003)

First public release

Version 0.4b (8 July 2003)

• Row subset count column in subsets window.
• Fixed and improved broken Parameter window.
• Fixed output of table name and parameters.
• Output to LaTeX tabular environment now available.
• SQL access buttons now greyed out when no JDBC drivers are present.
• UCD selection now available from New Synthetic Column dialogue.
• Column metadata display made more logical and flexible.
• Column cardinality now calculated in Stats window.
• Sythetic column expressions and most other column metadata now editable.
• Null value support in evaluated expressions.
• Integral example data provided.
• Hierarchical browser for tables available in load dialogue.

Version 0.4-1b (10 July 2003)

• Fixed a VOTable output bug (not escaping XML special characters).
• Fixed a serious FITS output bug.
• Improved bad value handling for FITS tables.

Version 0.5b (20 October 2003)

• Can now read plain text format tables.
• FITS files of arbitrary size can now be read (they are not loaded into memory).
• TOPCAT can now run without errors in a secure environment (e.g. as an unsigned jar file under WebStart). Of course some actions such as Save Table are unavailable in this context.
• Files compressed with Unix compress now work (as well as gzip and bzip2).
• Added hierarchy browser to load dialog.
• Added integral demo data (accessible from load dialog).
• Can now drag tables from Treeview into TOPCAT load dialog (or load button).
• Some bugfixes.

Version 0.5-1 (18 November 2003)

• Rewrite of FITS binary table access for big efficiency improvements.
• It's now possible to plug in user-defined algebraic methods at runtime.
• Improved unit testing leads to some bugfixes.

Version 1.1-0 (21 April 2004)

• User interface redesigned - now based around Control Window not table browser (much easier to work with multiple tables).
• Extensive facilities for table joining by matching rows between multiple tables or within a single one.
• Documentation much improved and available on- or off-line as SUN/253.
• Self-contained table access library STIL now provided as a separate product.
• Tables can be concatenated.
• Better top-level control over window proliferation.
• Columns can now be hidden/revealed not just deleted.
• Additional output formats/variants supported:
  • VOTable using BINARY or FITS encoding, inline or by reference
  • Machine-readable plain ASCII stream
  • HTML <TABLE> element or document
• Hybrid DOM/SAX parsing of VOTables for improved efficiency/memory usage.
• New flag -demo starts up with demo data.
• Miscellaneous efficiency improvements and bug fixes.

Version 1.1-3 (5 May 2004)

• Functions provided for radians<->sexagesimal conversion

Version 1.3 (20 October 2004)

This version has introduced many improvements in scalability, efficiency and functionality. TOPCAT is now quite happy with tables of a million rows or more (and hundreds of columns) even on systems with quite modest memory/CPU resources. The main improvements are as follows:

Plotting

• Plotting is much faster and can handle many more points
• Subsets can be selected from plot window by tracing out a non-rectangular region
• You have more choice over plotting symbols (including semi-transparent ones)
• Finally X or Y axes can be flipped!
• Export to encapsulated PostScript is of improved quality (though for many points file sizes can get large)
• Export to GIF format is available
• Regression lines can be plotted and coefficients displayed (experimental capability - could be improved)

Table Formats

• "-disk" flag allows use of disk backing storage for large tables
• New 'FITS-plus' format stores rich table/column metadata in a FITS file
• VOTable handler now fully VOTable 1.1 and 1.0 compatible
• VOTable parsing now works with Java 5.0 platform
• Comma-Separated Value format now supported for input and output
• ASCII input handler rewritten to cope with much larger tables
• ASCII handler now understands d/D as exponent letter as well as e/E
• ASCII handler now uses Short/Float not Integer/Double where appropriate to save memory
• ASCII format fixed bug for -0 degrees/hours in sexagesimal angles
• Null handling improved for FITS & VOTable formats
• FITS files store column descriptions in TCOMMx headers
• Better error messages for unparsable tables

Table Joins

• Various efficiency improvements and reductions in memory requirements
• In cases of multiple possible matches, the closest is now chosen rather than picking one at random
• Pair match now adds column containing score for each match (distance between points)
• Units can be selected RA/Dec columns and match errors (so it doesn't need to be all in radians)
• New match types suitable for multivariate matching (anistropic Cartesian, Sky+X, Sky+XY)

Data/Metadata Manipulation

• Can add/remove table parameters
• One-step column replacement dialogue from data or column windows
• Synthetic column expressions now written out to column descriptions

GUI Navigation and Display

• Improved rendering of numbers in tables (esp. Floats)
• Better detection of displayed table column widths
• New Control Window option on File menus
• Better window resizing for some dialogue boxes
• Less confusing error messages in many places

Algebraic Expressions

• All available functions are now fully documented in help document and interactive Method Window
• Many new trig, coordinate, type conversion, string manipulation functions
• Big performance improvements for null values

Activation Actions

• Clicking a point in the plot highlights the corresponding row in the data window and vice versa
• Row selection can trigger display sky cutout region display
• Row selection can trigger user-defined actions on activation

In addition, the following incompatibilities and changes have been introduced since the last version:

• The input format for tables can now be specified in the load window (via a selection box) or on the command line (using the "-f" flag). FITS files and VOTables can still be identified automatically (i.e. it's not necessary to specify format in this case) but ASCII tables cannot: you must now specify the format when loading ASCII tables. This change allows better error messages and support for more text-like formats.
• Algebraic expressions referencing row subsets now use the underscore character ("_") rather than the hash character ("#") to indicate a subset ID.
• Classes containing user-supplied functions for algebraic expressions are now specified using the properties "jel.classes" and "jel.classes.activation", not "gnu.jel.static.classes".
• The default output format for FITS tables is now the so-called "FITS-plus" format, which has a BINTABLE in its first extension as before, but the text of a VOTable stored in its primary HDU. This can store more metadata for TOPCAT, but should behave just the same for other FITS-compatible applications. The old behaviour can be restored if desired by specifying "FITS-basic" format.

Version 1.3-1 (10 November 2004)

Minor changes:

• 2MASS cutout servers now available from Activation Window
• Added Starlink logo to all windows

Version 1.3-2 (6 Dec 2004)

Bug fix:

• Error in parsing empty VOTable TD elements fixed.

Version 1.4 (4 Feb 2005)

Load Dialogues

The graphical table load dialogue has been overhauled, and now has two main new features. First, it has been rewritten so that the GUI does not freeze during a long load; it is still currently not possible to interact with other TOPCAT windows while a load is taking place, but you can now cancel a load that is in progress.

Secondly, the provision of load dialogues has been modularised, and a number of new dialogues provided. The new ones are:

• Cone Search
• MySpace Browser
• Registry Query
• SIAP Query

If the required classes are present, you can acquire tables from these external sources as well as the traditional methods of loading from disk etc. New command line flags corresponding to each of these have been added to ensure that they are present and make them prominent in the load dialogue. Furthermore it is possible to plug in additional load dialogues at runtime using the startable.load.dialogs system property.

The appearance of the Load Window has changed; now only the File Browser button is visible along with the Location field in the body of the window, but the DataSources menu can be used to display other available table import dialogues.

Packaging

The program can now be obtained in two standalone forms: topcat-full.jar and topcat-lite.jar. The former is much larger than before (11 Mbyte), since it contains a number of classes to support custom load dialogues such as the MySpace browser and web service interaction, as well as the SoG classes. The latter contains only the classes for the core functionality, and is much smaller (3 Mbyte).

Explode Array Column action

There is now a new button in the Columns Window which replaces an array-valued column with a scalar column for each of its elements.

Paste'n'Load

You can now load a table by pasting its filename or URL as text into the table list in the Control Window (using the X selection on X-windows - not sure if or how this works on other platforms).

Help message

The result of topcat -help is now more comprehensive, describing briefly what each option does and listing system properties as well as arguments/flags proper.

Version 1.4-1 (8 February 2005)

• Added Search Column item to Data Window column popup menu

Version 1.5 (17 March 2005)

File Access

Load dialogues have changed again somewhat, and save dialogues as well. The default file browser in both cases is now a Filestore Browser, which is very much like the standard file browser, but can browse files in remote filesystems as well; currently supported are files in AstroGrid's MySpace or on an SRB (Storage Resource Broker) server. You can now save files to these remote locations as well as load from them.

In addition, the save dialogue now displays the current row subset and sort order - this makes it easier to see and/or change the details of the table you're about to save.

BugFixes

A few more minor changes have been made.

• Error display dialogue boxes have been improved in some places
• Various bugs relating to JDBC database access have been fixed
• Some minor issues relating to VOTables with single-character columns have been addressed