Graphical User Interface / Launcer for FITS

[Remco van Veenendaal]

Dear FITS community,

At the National Archives of the Netherlands (NANETH) we're using FITS (and C3PO) to investigate (representative parts of) SIPs to be submitted to our e-depot.

The information from FITS and C3PO helps gauge the preservation impact of the (total) SIP.

Some of us have the technical skills to use FITS on the command line.

Others don't and have asked for a graphical user interface or launcer for FITS.

There is a FITS web service and a JAVA API.

Deploying a webserver with web service for our incidental FITS usage seems a bit heavy-weight for our purposes.

I would therefore like to ask you if anyone has used the API to create a graphical user interface / launcer for FITS.

If there is none, I'm probably going to have to develop one from scratch (which I'd like to avoid if there already is one).

Best regards,

Remco van Veenendaal

Preservation advisor

National Archives of the Netherlands

[David Birtwell]

Remco:

Actually there is a unofficial GUI wrapper I wrote some time ago. The GUI also include some testing capabilities using XMLUnit.

It was created for internal usage, but the code and a "distribution" (basically, a zip file) is in GitHub.

The program is written using the Groovy programming language to wrap Java Swing for the GUI, but is packaged in a way that as long as you have Java and FITS installed locally, you can just unzip the JAR file locally and update the config file to point to your local FITS distribution ... and it should run.

I am in the process of transferring the GitHub project to https://github.com/harvard-lts, which should be done today.

Again, this is currently not an officially supported application and most likely contains bugs and the documentation is sparse, but it might help you.

As soon as the repository is transferred, I'll send out some links to the latest distribution zip file and documentation.

Thanks,

Dave B. 

[David Birtwell]

Remco:

I just transferred the project to the FITS LTS GitHub account and it can be found at:

https://github.com/harvard-lts/FitsTester

and the distribution zip is located at:

https://github.com/harvard-lts/FitsTester/tree/master/build/distributions

The documentation file is the README.txt file which can be viewed at:

https://github.com/harvard-lts/FitsTester/blob/master/README.txt

Again, I warn you that this is not supported by Harvard at this time and should be used at your own risk.

Hope this helps!

Dave B.