STAF - Description

  The first production release of STAF was in June 1996. The version described here and used in the following tutorials is the SL97b version released in Dec. 1997. STAF is the brain child of Craig Tull and Doug Olson at LBNL. The following summarizes the essential characteristics of STAF:

• STAF is a highly modular data analysis and software development framework written mainly in C++; the numerous software components are linked and communicate via a software bus using CORBA compliant interface standards.
• STAF provides CORBA compliant (C++ like) encapsulation of user written analysis modules which enables these modules to be written in either Fortran 77, C or C++.
• STAF permits seamless integration of user written data structures and modules with system like software tools.
• The basic elements of STAF include:
            (a) KUIP, a user interface language
  
            (b) Software Bus
  
            (c) Analysis Service Packages (ASP) which handle system
  
                like functionality such as object management, I/O,
  
                data structures, and data translation to PAW ntuples.
  
            (d) Physics Analysis Modules (PAM) which are user written
  
                functions for simulations, reconstruction, calibration and
  
                physics analysis.
  
            (e) Datasets, data structure types and data structure
  
                instances (tables) which will be explained in the
  
                following.
  
            (f) Interface files for PAMs and data structure tables
  
                using the Interface Definition Language (IDL)
  
            (g) DataSet Library (DSL), XDR and other commercial software
  
            (h) PAW, to which STAF is directly linked
  
• A STAF session is initiated by typing a specific STAF executable filename at the UNIX prompt; action occurs by way of KUIP commands which invoke STAF and PAW functions.