Firefly is IPAC's Advanced Astronomy WEB UI Framework. It is for building a web-based Front end to access science archives. It provides sophisticated data visualization capabilities not available in many web-based archives. Our efforts to create a tightly integrated and user-friendly interface has generated numerous positive feedback from scientists. Users can browse and understand large volumes of archive data in a fraction of the time it took in the past.

Firefly is being reused for various archives because it is a framework of archive components. This has allowed us now to implement multiple archive systems at a fraction of the cost of the first system, Spitzer Heritage Archive.

By default, this repository builds a default example webapp. This tool can be used for viewing fits data, catalogs, and xyplots. It is a general viewer tool for retrieving and viewing astronomy related data.

Firefly Tools exposes the most powerful components of Firefly in a way that can be used by any web page with no prerequisites. It allows any web developer access to Firefly's FITS visualizers or Table Tool with just a very few lines of JavaScript. The goal is to make these tools very easy to use with only a 10 minute learning curve.

An important feature is that the Firefly Tools server can be installed cross-site. In other words, it is not required to be on the same server as the web page. Firefly Tools can do this because it uses JSONP or CORS for the server communication. This allows Firefly Tools not to be limited by the server's Same Origin Policy and to give the developer a lot of flexibility. The web developer does not have to do any installation, but can simply just start using Firefly Tools.

The firefly components contain 3 main visualizers for astronomy data.

Firefly has implemented “Excel-like” tables on the webpage. In an easy, interactive way, a user can sort the results, filter the data on multiple constraints, hide or show columns or select data for download or visualization. The Firefly Tools server is optimized to show very large tables without significant performance degradation. We have tested it with over 10 million rows, 50 column tables.

Firefly provides a first-class FITS visualization on the Web without any plugins. All of the significant components you would expect to see in a basic desktop FITS application are available with data that Firefly displays. The FITS visualizer allows for plotting anything that the table shows that has a Lon and Lat. Therefore, users can overlay multiple catalogs over their FITS image and interact with it.

Firefly shows 2D line graphs interactively so that a user can read the data point values as he moves his mouse around or zooms in to investigate the data at a finer level. These graphs are used for spectrum or plotting table columns. The user can specify any column that the tables are showing. The user can also define equations from the rows for the XY Plot, such as (row1*row2/tan(row3)

• [Java 1.7+] (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7-downloads-1880261.html) This is the version Firefly is tested on. Later versions should work as well, although it is not fully tested.

• [Gradle 2.3+] (https://gradle.org/downloads) Gradle is an open source build automation system.

• [Tomcat 7+] (http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi) Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

• [Node 0.12.0.+] (https://nodejs.org/download/) Javascript interpreter for command line environment, used for development tools

First git clone the firefly repository or download the zip (and unzip) to your target machine. Then install the prerequisites (node, java, tomcat).

In a terminal, cd into the firefly directory, then run:

$ gradle :firefly:jar

This generates firefly.jar located at ./jars/build/. You may include this jar into your project to build advanced astronomy web applications.

In a terminal, cd into the firefly directory, then run:

$ gradle :fftools:war

This generates fftools.war located at ./build/lib/. Simply drop this file into your $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/ directory to deploy it. $CATALINA_HOME is your Tomcat server installation directory.

Goto http://localhost:8080/fftools/ to launch Firefly Viewer.

####Firefly Tools JavaScript API overview see fftools-api-overview.md

####Firefly Tools Remote API using Python overview see firefly-python-wrapper.md

####Code Examples Using Firefly Tools see fftools-api-code-examples.md

####Setting up the Server correctly for FITS files see server-settings-for-fits-files.md

####Changing the Firefly runtime environment see firefly-environment.md