About Building Applications in IDL

IDL is a complete computing environment for the interactive analysis and visualization of data. IDL integrates a powerful, array-oriented language with numerous mathematical analysis and graphical display techniques. Programming in IDL is a time-saving alternative to programming in FORTRAN or C—using IDL, tasks which require days or weeks of programming with traditional languages can be accomplished in hours. You can explore data interactively using IDL commands and then create complete applications by writing IDL programs.

Advantages of IDL include:

IDL is a complete, structured language that can be used both interactively and to create sophisticated functions, procedures, and applications.

Operators and functions work on entire arrays (without using loops), simplifying interactive analysis and reducing programming time.

Immediate compilation and execution of IDL commands provides instant feedback and "hands-on" interaction.

Rapid 2D plotting, multi-dimensional plotting, volume visualization, image display, and animation allow you to observe the results of your computations immediately.

Many numerical and statistical analysis routines—including Numerical Recipes routines—are provided for analysis and simulation of data.

IDL's flexible input/output facilities allow you to read any type of custom data format. Support is also provided for common image standards (including BMP, JPEG, and XWD) and scientific data formats (CDF, HDF, and NetCDF).

IDL widgets can be used to quickly create multi-platform graphical user interfaces to your IDL programs.

IDL programs run the same across all supported platforms (Microsoft Windows and a wide variety of Unix systems) with little or no modification. This application portability allows you to easily support a variety of computers.

Existing FORTRAN and C routines can be dynamically-linked into IDL to add specialized functionality. Alternatively, C and FORTRAN programs can call IDL routines as a subroutine library or display "engine".