William Pence
HEASARC/NASA
This talk will describe the main features of the FTOOLS project that have enabled it to produce and manage a large package of software with low development costs. The FTOOLS software package is a modular, platform-independent set of programs for analyzing FITS format data files in general, with a strong emphasis on data from high energy astrophysics missions. FTOOLS development began in 1991 and has produced the main set of data analysis software for the current ASCA and XTE space missions and for other archival sets of X-ray and Gamma-ray data. One of the main requirements of FTOOLS was to support both the IRAF and non-IRAF user communities, so the FTOOLS software can be built as either an IRAF package or as a set of executables that can be run directly from the host operating system. Platform-independence has been achieved in part by adopting FITS as the run-time data analysis format; the advantages of directly operating on FITS format files will be discussed. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how other external project groups have developed their own FTOOLS analysis tools that can be integrated with the existing FTOOLS packages.