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Welcome to the libpninx

This site tries to collate information about libpninx which might be interesting for users, administrators, developers. libpninx provides an alternative C++ API for the Nexus file format. It has been agreed by many research facilities in the field of photon-, neutron-science that Nexus will be the future common standard for storing the data recorded during an experiment.
The original C++ API that can be downloaded from the Nexus site is pretty close to the C-API of Nexus. Thus, it lacks of a lot of C++ language features a C++ programmer would expect in an API. Since libpninx is a pure C++ implementation it provides all these features that make C++ one of the most wide spread programming languages.

This wiki is not intended as a complete documentation for libpninx. It should rather give you a short overview over its capabilities and concepts and help you to get started. In other words - if you have never heard about libpninx and want to know whether or not the library is useful for you you are at the right place.

• The basic concepts
• C++ features
• Performance
• Installation

There are limitations too. libpninx supports only HDF5 as a physical file format while the original Nexus API provides support for HDF4 and XML too. Though being definitely a limitation over the Nexus C-API its impact might be rather low. HDF4 is entirely outdate and XML is not really the format of choice if one wants to store large amounts of data. Another drawback over the native C-API might be the fact that libpninx is a pure C++ library which makes it a bit harder to create bindings to procedural languages like FORTRAN or C.