Technology Hall Of Fame: The Programs That Make This Possible

Technology Hall Of Fame The Programs That Make This Possible

WW2010 depends on a variety of software packages and technology, some developed here, and much by the work of countless others. Although we can't officially/commercially endorse any of these products, here are a few of the more significant ones that we'd gratefully like to acknowledge:

Roxen
from Informations Vävarna (Infovav)

Roxen Challenger from Infovav is WWW server at the heart of WW2010. We've been with this server since the early days of Spinner (Roxen's predecessor). We considered a number of other servers for this project ranging from the simplest free ones to some expensive well known commercial ones, but none other had the unique combination of power, flexibility, extensibilty and innovative approaches that Roxen offered. Right out of the box (so to speak) it came the closest to what we needed and was easy enough to extend with a few hundred lines of Pike (their unique programming language) to do what we wanted.

AutoTree from TDP Software (UIUC-DAS)
AutoTree is in-house software developed for the WW2010 project and is responsible for automatically generating and maintaining the ever present menu/navigation system that you see on the left of each page. It also handles other navigational aspects as well as page formatting, graphics/text modes and provides error checking.

	MySQL from T.c.X DataKonsult AB
MySQL, written by Michael Widenius at TCX DataKonsolt AB, is a powerful mostly free SQL engine, rapidly gaining popularity amongst web application developers around the world. Autotree (see above) employs MySQL to store all navigation information and page text. We've found it to be very fast and powerful.

NCAR Graphics v4.0 from University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
NCAR Graphics is a well established graphics software package which is the core engine for the generation of the current weather products used within WW2010.

GEMPAK from Unidata University Corporation for Atmospheric Research	[Image: ]
GEMPAK is a suite of applications designed for the analysis, display and diagnosis of weather data. It was used in the generation of the current weather products to preprocess the data and grid it when necessary.

WXP from Dan Vietor Purdue University
Some of the maps and images that appear as examples in the online guides (not including current weather products) were partly produced by Dan Vietor's famous Weather Processor package (WXP) version 5.0. Few of us in the atmospheric sciences academic community could live without this fine piece of software.

[Image: ]	GD1.2 and GD.pm from Boutell.Com and Lincoln D. Stein
GD is a fast GIF/graphics file creation library written by Thomas Boutell (originally at the Quest Protein Database Center). It along with GD.pm (the Perl interface to GD written by Lincoln D. Stein) help out with GIF creation/modification throughout the server.

Perl by Larry Wall
Perl (in all of its many features and extensions) is used heavily throughout to run things behind the scenes. This very text passed through a Perl buffer someplace recently. Co-developer, David Wojtowicz, thinks its just the greatest. Some may sneer, but we think our results speak for themselves.

	Adobe Photoshop from Adobe
Where would we be without Adobe Photoshop. Nearly all the cool non-weather-product graphics on this site were produced with this very powerful package. Co-developer, Steve Hall, can make it do nearly anything with pixels.

Others:

Xiaolin Wu, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Western Ontario, London Ontario -- for fast color quantization code

There are, of course, many other useful software packages that went into the creation of WW2010. We will endeavor to list them here as we think of them

organizations

Terms for using data resources. CD-ROM available.
Credits and Acknowledgments for WW2010.
Department of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Meteorology