GAE Graphics Software Products and GKS Comaptibility
Galaxy Advanced Engineering, Inc. presents a migration bridge for callable GKS routines within your
existing FORTRAN program via its high level FORTRAN graphics library Language that is called UGL.
UGL is a Scientific Graphics Subroutine Library for any computing system such as Main, Micro and Mini-Computers
with its given Operating System. UGL presently supports hardware such as HP/UNIX, SUN/SOLARIS, Alpha/OpenVMS, VAX/VMS,
LINUX, SGI/IRIX and Window95/98/2000 and NT or DOS
UGL-GRAPHICS was developed to provide a migration path with a
CA-DISSPLA,
PLOT10,
CalComp,
PLOT88,
and DIGLIB (from Lawrence Livermore Lab.) graphics interface in the PC and VAX as well as UNIX environment and provides the same high graphics standards found on the main frames using the above graphics libraries. The most common subset of CA-DISSPLA routine (more than %95) and rest of the mentioned graphics libraries are supported directly and any particular ones may be provided upon request. If the users have an existing code using any of these graphics library routines within them, they do not have to change their calls. The bridge that are built with UGL - GRAPHICS library of Galaxy advanced Engineering, Inc. will distinguish these routines and maps them to its own routine against these calls for direct porting of the user code to its new env
ironment supported by UGL-GRAPHICS.
What is GKS?
GKS (Graphical Kernel System) is an ANSI and ISO standard. GKS standardizes two-dimensional graphics functionality at a relatively low level. The primary purposes of the standard are:
To provide for portability of gragphics application programs.
To aid in the understanding of graphics method by application programmers.
To provide guidelines for manufacturers in describing useful graphics capabilities.
The GKS (as described on the actual standard document: Computer Graphics - Graphical Kernel System (GKS) Functional Description, ANSI X3.124-1985) consists of three basic parts:
- An informal exposition of the contents of the standard which includes such things as how text is positioned, how polygonal areas to be filled, and so forth.
- A formalization of the expository material in 1. by way of abstracting the ideas into discrete functional descriptions. These functional descriptions such as description contain such information as descriptions of input and output parameters, precise descriptions of the effect each function should have, references into the expository material in 1., and a description of error conditions. The functional descriptions in this section are language independent.
- Language bindings. These bindings are an implementation of the abstract functions described in 2. in a specific computer language such as FORTRAN or Ada or C.
GKS stratifies its functionality into twelve functional levels, depending on the complexity of the graphical input and output. There are four levels of output (m,0,1,2) and three levels of input (A,B,C). GKS contains a full implementation of GKS FORTRAN at level 0A.
The following are some examples of plots that are generated by UGL-GKS bridge using PURE GKS SOURCE codes.
