B.2 Version History

Releases to date have been as follows:

Version 0.3b (4 June 2003)
First public release
Version 0.4b (8 July 2003)
Version 0.4-1b (10 July 2003)
Version 0.5b (20 October 2003)
Version 0.5-1 (18 November 2003)
Version 1.1-0 (21 April 2004)
Version 1.1-3 (5 May 2004)
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:

Version 1.3-1 (10 November 2004)
Minor changes:
Version 1.3-2 (6 Dec 2004)
Bug fix:
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)
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
Version 1.6 (30 June 2005)
Activation Actions
Some more activation functionality has been added:
  • New View URL as Web Page option introduced in Activation Window
  • New System class of activation functions containing exec functions which execute commands on the local operating system
  • New Browsers class of activation functions for displaying URLs in web browsers (external or basic fallback one)
Algebraic Functions
New Times class added containing functions for converting between Modified Julian Day and ISO 8601 format epochs.
Sky Matching
The default sky matching algorithm now uses HEALPix rather than HTM for assigning sky pixels to RA,Dec positions. This gives much faster sky matches in most cases, and uses somewhat less memory so can be used on larger tables. It has also fixed a bug which missed out some possible matches. HTM-based matching is currently still provided as an option, but this is mainly for debugging purposes and may be withdrawn in the future.
Logging
The message logging has been tidied up. The main observable consequence of this is that fewer untidy messages are written to the console when TOPCAT is run from a standalone jar file rather than a full starjava installation. By specifying the new -verbose (or -v) flag one or more times you can get those messages back. The messages (in fact all logging messages at any level) can also be viewed from the GUI by using the new File|Show Log menu option from the Control Window.
SOAP Services
TOPCAT now acts as a SOAP server; SOAP requests can now be made to a running instance of TOPCAT to get it to display tables by location or by sending XML for a VOTable direct. Because of limitations in Axis, this latter method won't work for arbitrarily large tables.
Documentation changes
The tablecopy tool is no longer covered in this document; it is replaced by the tcopy tool in the separate STILTS package. There has also been some reorganisation of this document, mainly in the appendices.
Minor changes
  • Added -version flag
  • Added (dummy) Print option to Data Window. This just presents a message to the effect that you should save to a printable format.
  • Fixed a bug which gave errors when expressions contained a NULL_ test on the first column of a table.
  • Modified one of the demo tables to contain a column with URLs in it.
Version 1.6-1 (7 July 2005)
Bugfixes:
Version 1.7 (30 September 2005)
Crossmatching
There have been major improvements in the flexibility, and minor improvements to performance, of two-table crossmatching.
  • New match algorithm Sky with Errors introduced. This allows you to specify a column giving the maximum permissible match error (so it can vary per row) rather than a fixed value for the whole table.
  • In the case of multiple possible matches between the two tables, instead of automatically giving you only the closest match, you can now select whether you'd like only the closest one or all those which fit your criteria.
  • You can now specify which rows you want to see in the output: 1 and 2, 1 or 2, All from 1, All from 2, 1 not 2, 2 not 1, 1 xor 2. This is pretty much all the possibilities which make sense, and in particular allows you to do 'left outer joins' (1 not 2).
  • The match score column which results from most matches now comes (a) in sensible units where possible (e.g. arcseconds not radians) and (b) with metadata which tells you what its meaning and units are.
  • More information is available in added columns after the match; as well as the match score, information about matched groups is inserted where appropriate.
  • The "Spherical Polar" match algorithm is now rebadged as the hopefully less confusing "Sky 3d".
Similar changes for 1-table and multi-table matches should follow in future versions.
MySpace Access
MySpace I/O has been re-implemented to use the ACR rather than the (now deprecated) CDK classes it was using before. As well as probably being more reliable and less likely to break with future changes in MySpace server protocols, this gives the benefit of single sign on. The effect of this is that you will need to have the AstroGrid desktop running on your machine before you can access MySpace from TOPCAT.
Algebraic functions
  • Added Julian Epoch and Besselian Epoch conversion functions to Times class.
  • Added RANDOM special function.
Miscellaneous
  • When you select a column in the Columns window, it now scrolls the table in the Data Window so that the selected column is visible. This is a boon when dealing with tables that have very many columns.
  • String "null" interpreted as a blank value in ASCII tables.
  • Added new activation action to launch system default browser.
Bugfixes
  • Fixed some relatively harmless bugs to do with actions available when you select the dummy "Index" column. You can now unsort from a popup menu in the table viewer window.
  • Believed to work fine with Java 1.5 now (there were previously some issues with MySpace at Java 1.5).
  • Fixed bug in ASCII input handler which misidentified blank lines, or DOS-format line ends, as end of file.
Version 1.7-1 (4 October 2005)
Bugfixes:
Version 1.8 (13 October 2005)