A short description of packages referred to in this document are given below.
The data structure management package ZEBRA was developed at CERN in order to overcome the lack of dynamic data structure facilities in FORTRAN, the favourite computer language in high energy physics. It implements the dynamic creation and modification of data structures at execution time and their transport to and from external media. ZEBRA input/output is either by a sequential or direct access method. Two data representations, native (no data conversion when transferred to/from the external medium) and exchange (a conversion to/from an interchange format is made if necessary), allow data to be transported between computers of the same and of different architectures.
Many of the packages described below are based on Zebra.
EPIO is an input/output package still in use by some experiments at CERN. CSPACK provides remote file transfer and access for EPIO files.
The purpose of KUIP ( Kit for a User Interface Package) is to handle the dialogue between the user and the application program It parses the commands input into the system, verifies them for correctness and then hands over control to the relevant action routines.
HBOOK provides a library of FORTRAN callable routines for the manipulation of histograms, scatter plots, tables and ntuples. These may be stored on disk files using the RZ direct access routines of the ZEBRA package.
The PAW system is widely used by physicists to perform interactive data analysis and presentation. It uses the facilities provided by packages such as HBOOK, KUIP and of course ZEBRA.
The FATMEN system provides a fully distributed file catalogue and file access in a location, operating system and device independent manner. The ZEBRA RZ package is used to store the file catalogue information. The CSPACK facilities are also used by FATMEN for catalogue update distribution, remote file access and remote data file access.
PATCHY is a source code management system which has been in use for many years. Files may be stored in a number of formats: CARD files, compact binary PAM files or in CETA format. All of the above formats may be transferred between different machines by tools in the CSPACK package.
CMZ is an advanced Code Management system, backward compatible with PATCHY, that is based on ZEBRA. As with HBOOK, the ZEBRA RZ package is used to store data on disk.