The requirement for end-user flexibility can impose a burden on application developers. Not only must they deliver state-of-the-art application technology, but they must also provide high quality graphical user interfaces and application views. Furthermore, applications are required to be portable to almost any conceivable combination of Unix hardware and software platforms. In these days where time to market is of supreme importance, there frequently isn't time to develop both the application-specific code as well as the infrastructure to support the graphical user interface and hardcopy requirements.
For example, a fixed-size, monochrome wiggle trace display just isn't good enough these days; an interpreter expects to have at his disposal the capability to zoom and scroll the seismic section and to display it in one or a combination of seismic display modes. The facility to pick events, to overlay the section with well logs and graphical annotation and to produce hardcopy (PostScript and/or CGM+) are all minimal requirements of any application that deals with seismic data.
The INT Geoscience Library provides a set of tools for the types of displays and functionality listed above. This library consists of a collection of widgets for displaying and manipulating seismic data (Seismic/Segy widget), Well logs (WellLog widget) and surface maps (Contour widget). These widgets all work in conjunction with the other INT widget and object libraries -- the EditColor/EditColormap widget, the Movie widget, the Picking library, the ObjectEditor library, the Scroll widget plus the EditTable widget and the ChartObject library -- to provide a full range of easy-to-program building blocks for geoscientific applications.
A programmer can use these tools singly or in combination to provide the display services that are needed for a particular application. The INT products also integrate well into existing development environments, including most popular GUI builders, since they are fully Motif compliant widgets and objects.
An application programmer familiar with the Motif user interface can master the widgets in the Geoscience Library in a very short period of time. The application interface for these widgets and objects is just the Xt Intrinsic interface already in use by thousands of X/Motif programmers.