| Developer(s) | Satimage Software |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.3.1 / April 9, 2008 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | Data analysis |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www.satimage-software.com |
Smile is a Macintosh computer programming and working environment based on AppleScript. It features a number of production technologies and a natural fashion of having them work together. Smile is primarily designed for scientists, engineers, desktop publishers, and web administrators, to help them producing faster and better, automating frequent tasks, and controlling complex operations.
Smile is free, except for two families of technologies: data visualization (SmileLab) and http requests handling (Smile Server).
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The name of the first version of Smile, released in 1995, was SMILE (upper case), and some users still name it so. The acronym stood for SMI, Limited Edition, where SMI itself stands for Scriptable Measurements on Images. SMI is the name of the software that Satimage, a French company in Machine vision, develops and uses to power the systems that they supply, automated real-time measurement and inspection systems for industrial plants.
SMI is really a core engine, written in C/C++, which alone does nothing: it requires an interface, and that interface's behavior is programmed in AppleScript, in scripts. SMI's core implements the key features of the software, and publishes them to AppleScript. SMI is designed to make development costs lower while maintaining a wide range of applications. Basically, Smile is just SMI, sans the real-time video processing features.
Satimage's industrial clients are continuously more demanding, and SMI - thus, Smile - improves. The need for 2D and 3D real-time visualization (of the measurements) gave rise to SmileLab. More recently, web-based control of facilities becomes a standard, and Smile is now also a web applications server - and a web browser.
The technologies included in Smile:
The SmileLab license adds the data analysis and data visualization features to Smile. SmileLab provides an Aqua interface to make any data graph "manually", and libraries of commands to make graphs and process data by script (SmileLab can display at any moment the script corresponding to the user's action.)
The mathematical commands are optimized, and versatile thanks to AppleScript. Even with the default settings, suitable for an average page size, the graphical documents (PDFs, bitmaps, videos of 1D, 2D, and 3D graphs, and custom graphics) are of professional quality.
SmileLab does not use a proprietary computational language or data format. Computational extensions can be written in C or C++. SmileLab handles the most usual data file formats, and extensions for other file formats can easily be plugged-in.
Basically, the Smile system and SmileLab will appeal to those concerned with not doing the same thing twice. For instance, once a plot finely tuned with custom settings, the user can view and save the (AppleScript) script to get exactly the same settings later. One single language, AppleScript, drives the computations, produces the graphics, schedules the actions, and handles the interfaces: SmileLab's built-in interface as well as the interfaces that the user builds. So the script once saved may then be used in a variety of contexts.
Also, the Smile system and SmileLab benefit from a unique feature of AppleScript: live interaction with running codes. AppleScript - and SmileLab helps with that - can interact with (get information from and send commands to) a program while it is running. This feature is a concern for scientists or engineers running long computations or computations involving large amounts of data, when stopping, dumping, then relaunching a program implies significant costs.
Smile Server makes a bridge between a CGI program and AppleScript. This works by Smile opening a server port. A specific cgi, included, makes an http request into a p-list (Apple's associative array XML format) and sends it to Smile Server on that port (specified in a configuration file). Asynchronous as well as synchronous behaviors are implemented, allowing Smile Server to be used as an alternate solution to .asp or .php to build dynamic sites, including AJAX-based web sites.
Smile Server also handles XML-RPC requests.
The first users of Smile Server are physicists who use it to publish computational models. See an example in solar physics.