What Can Software Developers Do With Spec?


Gerry Swislow
Certified Scientific Software

Spec is a widely used software package for instrument control and data acquisition at synchrotron and reactor beamlines and with laboratory X-ray sources. Spec's design offers great flexibility to the scientist at the time of the experiment. Spec also contains many facilities that allow custom code, programs and utilities to be coordinated with spec using techniques as varied as included C code to shared memory to socket I/O. These facilities are already in use to accomplish functions from performing custom reciprocal space refinements, to providing real-time displays of 2D CCD data, to saving binary data using custom file formats. This talk will review the facilities in spec, both old and new, that allow customization for special applications.

(posted 21-Oct-97 jw)