Plans for Future Development

Version 1.02 of ROOT includes many improvements compared to version 1.00 released 6 months ago. Based on the experience acquired within the NA49 collaboration and many comments and suggestions from several experiments and individuals interested by the evolution of the system, we are considering the implementation of the following items:

• Finish the current prototype implementation of PROOF. The 1.00 version of PROOF supports only parallel processing of 1D histograms. The final version will generalize parallel processing for any TTree and TChain object. Using TChains PROOF will be able to analyze in parallel hundreds of GBytes of TTrees in real- (or nearly real-) time.
• Implement multi-threading also for Unix systems. The Windows/NT implementation is already multi-threaded. We intend to implement a platform independent set of multi-threading classes (partly done in v1.03).
• Support for very large files on systems with 64-bit file system support.
• Continue to develop our cross-platform GUI and graphics system.
• Better documentation, more examples, more TODO's, etc.
• A Java version of the histogram and graphics classes. The Java version will be able to display histograms stored on ROOT database files.

Please, let us know what you think should be added to this list.