JAVA-NDS: B. Singh (McMaster Univ.) Developed started in 2007 with contract from NNDC, BNL to Roy Zywina; and my interaction with Roy. A code supplied by Roy in January 2008 was not operational; Roy quit after half-time of contract term. Later work by Scott Geraedts and Jeremie Choquette in ; workable version presented at 2009, 2011-NSDD meetings. In 2011 or so a complete A=182 chain was prepared in NDS style. Output reviewed by several evaluators, and Marion Blennau. Review copy of A=75 was produced using this code and sent to reviewer. Sept 2011, turned over this code to NNDC for further improvement and smooth working. For several A-chains published in NDS, Marion Blennau used this code to generate band drawings, until quite recently. Marco Verpelli at IAEA-NDS is using this code for some level-scheme drawings.

Jun Chen’s comments (April 14, 2015) Pros: Similar layout as that of the NDS-PUB. No difficulty and discomfort for users in transition from old layout. Times New Roman used as the standard font, as in most journals Final level and JPI added for each γ-transition, making it convenient for user to read. In current NDS-PUB output, sometimes it is frustrating to keep turning pages between the level table and the gamma table in order to check the final level and its JPI for a gamma transition. Better band drawing function than NDS-PUB. Since 2009 or so, this function has been used for band drawing in NDS publication of mass-chain evaluation.

Jun Chen’s comments Pros: Easy maintenance of the program. It is well written with the modern and popular programing language JAVA, compared with the FORTRAN for the old NDS-PUB program. JAVA is more powerful and flexible in dealing with file and string input/output; is in object- oriented language, and is easy to read, understand and modify. User-friendly graphical interface makes it very easy to use. The new NDS-JAVA program can produce an output with similar layout to the NDS-PUB, but with many advantages and improvements. The outdated NDS-PUB program needs to be replaced in the long run. Now that there is an alternative available (NDS-JAVA), people should pay more attention to it and think about its feasibility.

Jun Chen’s comments.. Cons: No final stable version is available since no one has worked on it since It should go through many tests before it can be made available to NSDD network. One needs to manually change the page orientation for wide tables in a global control file. It is time-consuming. Function needs to be added in the program for selecting the orientation automatically according to table widths. Work needs to be done in creating a better and more useful “control file”.

Demo of this code for A=43 chain Default control file generated by the code was edited around 2012 He had also written a brief manual for using this code.