About NASAView

NASAView was developed as a simple display tool for data contained in the PDS archive with a requirement that it run on multiple hardware platforms and convert between machine specific data formats as necessary. This application was built using the PDS Label Library Light (L3), PDS Object Access Library (OAL), and the XVT Portability Toolkit.

The PDS OAL and L3 libraries provide access to PDS labeled data products and represent the standard software libraries available for the production and use of the PDS archive. The L3 library reads and parses a product label and allows access to label information using standard function calls. The OAL, using the label information, manipulates the actual science data at three levels. At the lowest level or stream layer, physical record format differences such as <CR><LF> versus <LF> record delimiters are addressed. At the next higher level or structure layer, data format differences such as byte-order is addressed. Finally at the object layer, data products can be manipulated using object-based function calls.

The XVT Portability Toolkit, a commercial product, provides the cross platform GUI development environment for NASAView. It allows an interface to be developed on one platform and to then be ported to another supported platform with little effort. Most important for this application, it utilizes the native windowing system on the target platform. This provides a user with the expected look-and-feel on a specific platform while also providing the same application functionality across platforms.

Please send comments, change requests and bug reports to the PDS Operator at pds_operator@jpl.nasa.gov.