Last week I wrote about all the things we wanted to achieve for the next version of ILWIS. The question is of course, how realistic is this? I mean, the current ILWIS is collaberative effort over many years. There is a huge amount of knowledge, experience and work involved that is not easily reproducable. The original group that produced ILWIS doesn’t exist anymore (I was part of it) and the resources have been severely reduced. On the other hand, in the landscape of software development, there have been fundamental changes that are very beneficial to this undertaking. The rise of open source software is a very big boon and the frameworks for building UI’s have become much more convenient to use. And, to my (sort of at least) surprise, the core design of the ILWIS 2&3 data structures was, with some adaptations, still very usuable in the modern context; a tribute to the original designers (no, not me, before my time).
It is this organization of data and its changes that I want to talk about in this blog, not the nitty, gritty C++ that is the core of Ilwis, but more on the level that users will encounter. After all, this is the basis on which the rest of ILWIS is built.more >