OpenScientist 16.0

OpenScientist is an integration of open source products working together to do scientific visualization and data analysis, in particular for high energy physics (HEP).
The project is definitely NOT one million lines of intricated and unnecessary complicated home made code reinventing everything.
Motivations
Experiments in high energy and nuclear physics need to be at the edge of computing technologies but at the same time have to face a very long life time (LHC experiments are going to be a matter of decades). This involves that the software must be organized in a way that permits to include or discard some technologies in an easy way without having to recode everything at each change of a piece.
For data analysis, the HEP community had used the CERN/PAW tool for years. Whilst this program had been used and is probably still used by hundred of physicists in the world, it is not any more maintained by the lab that created and promoted it : CERN. This lab had not been able to establish long term collaborative software engineering plans in order to have a technical follow up of this program and analysis tools in general. (What is astounding, is that the same people that were behind CERN/PAW come now with another tool (ROOT) which has exactly the same engineering defects).
OpenScientist is first of all an architecture trying to handle the problem differently to avoid upseting huge software phase transitions in the future. The key points of the system are the modularity and the openness. See the Languages, Coarse graining architecture, and The file formats intrinsic pain section for more about the technical choices and design.
Enhancements:
- An HDF5 driver was introduced in BatchLab.
- The build system was replaced with obuild.
- Support for CoinPython was added.
- Initial support was added for both Qt4 and SDL.
- Examples were added.
- Assorted code cleanups and speedups were done.