[Halld-offline] [EXTERNAL] new User's Guide and release of HDDM

[Richard Jones]

Hello,

As a user of GlueX software, you are probably familiar with the HDDM file
format that is used for our GlueX simulation and REST data, and have used
the HDDM tools at some level. I have just finished collecting all of the
bits of documentation on HDDM into a single comprehensive User's Guide,
which is published on our portal as GlueX-doc-4917.

I have also broken out all of the HDDM components from the halld_recon and
halld_sim frameworks into its own github project
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_rjones30_HDDM&d=DwIBaQ&c=CJqEzB1piLOyyvZjb8YUQw&r=Te_hCR4EUlJ6iCDYLJ8Viv2aDOR7D9ZZMoBAvf2H0M4&m=nq3Ol7nci8SC5pT7ptTiDQukZoL7RA8gk7_eXhtm5GA&s=zEfT8ymErDUIUXHSSEogqCdfkUzhp0L0NVOq4f-siE4&e= , with its own build system based on CMake
and supporting documentation. The software managers for GlueX may at some
point want to split out hddm from where it is redundantly embedded in both
halld_recon and halld_sim, and fork it to
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_JeffersonLab_HDDM&d=DwIBaQ&c=CJqEzB1piLOyyvZjb8YUQw&r=Te_hCR4EUlJ6iCDYLJ8Viv2aDOR7D9ZZMoBAvf2H0M4&m=nq3Ol7nci8SC5pT7ptTiDQukZoL7RA8gk7_eXhtm5GA&s=icndcis5uqaXoeGn7tQyKIbLadLVSksovHP3QMz87xw&e=  so it can be managed using the version
release system that Mark Ito presently manages.

This was quite a bit of effort, but the reason I did it now was to support
the creation of a set of GlueX activities on the Particle Physics
Playground. This PPP web site provides a simple interface to sample data
from a handful of well-known experiments (CLEO, BaBaR, CMS) that come with
guided exercises called "playground activities" where students can
"discover" the D+meson, or find the top quark in multi-jet events. Based
upon Jupyter notebooks within a fully hosted analysis environment, I have
found these to greatly lower the barrier to undergraduates getting involved
in analysis without spending weeks and weeks learning C++ and ROOT. Even
the ambitious high school student can master one of these activities on
their own within a matter of a few hours.

-Richard Jones
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/attachments/20210215/58114b2e/attachment.html>