(for Duke Students)
Note: We now use Samba instead of Xtango. Xtango commands work in Samba, plus you can do much more. JAWAA is another alternative.
There are two methods for programming in Xtango, writing C programs and an easier way of interpreted programs called the Animator. This page describes the animator.
Xtango, and the newer tools Polka and Samba (the animator for Polka) were developed by John Stasko at Georgia Tech. To obtain these tools or receive more information CLICK HERE .
For any program (C++, pascal, etc), write output statements that are animator commands, and pipe the animator commands to a program called the animator.
For example, if you have a C++ program named traffic.cc and its executable is named traffic, then to run the program traffic and pipe the output to the animator, type:
traffic | animator
(where animator may need to be the long pathname below).
xrdb -merge xtango.resBEFORE running the animator or any xtango program. The file xtango.res is in the same place as the animator command, so you will probably have to prepend the path name before xtango.res in the above, i.e. on acpub or CS machines, type
xrdb -merge ~rodger/bin/xtango.res
~rodger/bin/animatorand there are several xtango animations in
~rodger/bin/anims
/usr/project/misc/etools/bin/animator