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Recommended Information pathway: After browsing the Advanced Topics, Visit the Foundry Floor

...to learn that using these together is now possible and easy.

With the use of a plug-in that connects IDL® and Director®, your IDL scripts can be accessed through Director-authored applications and your Director applications can now contain real data and analysis windows that have all the capabilities of IDL.

"RSI, the developers of IDL, are pleased to add their support to the Data Discovery Toolkit and Foundry project in the National STEME Digital Library. By combining the data handling power of IDL with the media application capabilities of Macromedia’s Director this project brings together the strengths of two leading software products, and opens up new avenues for fast and inexpensive data-rich application development for the entire NSDL community. We look forward to working with The New Media Studio to show how IDL, which is usually regarded
as a high-end research application, can become an engine for data-use education
in all contexts. RSI has always envisioned this software as a research and
educational tool, and we are gratified to see this in active use by the NSDL community."

RSI's IDL and the EXMI Xtra that connects this to Director

The Earth Data Multimedia Instrument (EDMI) Xtra for Macromedia Director was originally developed out of the desire to allow students the ability explore Earth-science related data sets within a Director application. Research System Inc.'s Interactive Data Language (IDL) is an authoring tool for creating interactive data visualization and analysis applications and is used by many researchers in Earth Science fields. What the EDMI Xtra accomplishes is the ability to run an IDL session within Macromedia Director and to place IDL output in Diretor sprites. Thus, real-time data visualization and analysis can be done within Director along with any other of Director's multimedia elements such as digital audio, digital video, Macromedia Flash, and/or shockwave animations, to name a few. In combining the power of IDL and Director, the EDMI Xtra allows for the development of more than just Earth-Data multimedia instruments. Really, the EDMI Xtra can be used to create applicaitons that can interact, visualize, and analize any data set that IDL can be taught to read.
The EDMI Xtra itself provides potential. Making use of that potential requires some programming in IDL and Director's Lingo scripting language. The EDMI Xtra creates an IDL instance within Director; meaning, a whole programming environment is added. To run routines in IDL the commands have to be passed via Lingo to the IDL instance. Our programmers understand the difficulties of multilingual programming and have endeavored to provide sufficient resources to minimize those difficulties.
The EDMI Xtra, then, comes with more than just the Xtra. It also requires supporting files in order for the IDL programming environment to function. These files include dynamic link library (dll) files, fonts, and a color table. These files are required for the EDMI Xtra to and basic IDL functionality to work. However, IDL programmers know that there are many proceedure files (.pro) files that are often included with IDL that are other files often included with IDL which are useful if not mandatory for interactive data projects to be developed. An entire collection of .pro files as well as additonal dlls, fonts, maps, and other IDL resources are also provided. There are two packages available for your use. These packages are the EDMI Essentials Package and the EDMI Additions Package. EDMI Essentials contains the minimum collection of files required for working with IDL in Director. EDMI Additions contain the additional scripts and resources provided by IDL for your development needs. Note, though, that the hook folder (which contains widget scripts) has been removed because widget technology because the EDMI does not currently support widgets.

Macromedia Director

We use Director to create our applications because Macromedia is dedicated to keeping up-to-date with emerging multimedia technology and evolving operating systems. Director is also extendable through its Xtra technology so that we too can make it compatible with media it may not support such as scientific data-sets. As a foundry developer you have the ability to consider applications which are engaging, media-rich, state-of-the-art, scientifically relavent, and pedagocially usefull.
The foundry, though, is more than a factory for pumping out data discovery products, it is intended to be a community of developers. As a member of the Director developer community you are invited to share your victories and difficulties whilein your experiences with Director development. Since the community is open-(re)source you aslo get the benefit of the work done by others; and hopefully, we too will get the benefit of code you create as part of being a member of our community. By sharing your thoughts and your code you become a valued asset in our toolkit and foundry.
As a community, the challenge before us as Director developers is finding the perfect balance of simplicity, reusability, functionality, user-friendliness, developer-friendliness, and fiscal-friendliness. Rather than expecting any one project to do this over-night we work together as a community to evolve our projects and our own programming skill until we finally rise to this challenge. If this is a challenge you are willing to take on, we would be happy to have you join the Data Discovery Toolkit & Foundry and our Director Developer community.