Autoplot in 2025 - Review of Lessons Learned

Autoplot is a data visualization and analysis system introduced in 2007. It was written to provide an free and open alternative to IDL, where the Radio and Plasma Wave Group's Das2 Java library for plotting spectrograms and line plots would be married to new Java codes for handling data formats like CDF and ASCII tables, and Jython would be used to provide scripting. Since then Python has become dominant, and my goal has been to keep the software relevant.

First, Autoplot provides a no-code solution to get graphics. Autoplot uses "URIs" to control existing read routines, and loads this data into a standard internal model, QDataSet. Scientists and engineers can quickly peek at data files, plot data from CDAWeb, and run plots of an entire mission as a batch job. Second, I believe there are lessons learned in its scripting environment. QDataSet has a thin syntax and relies on semmantics to give form and could represent data in other languages, like Python. This is a model which is about 20 years old now, and I'm able to represent all data within Autoplot using it. Finally, Autoplot has always been designed to bridge into other languages, and can provide services to IDL, Matlab, and Python, and I would like to these more useful, potentially reducing the amount of code needed in these environments.