Hi Greg,
Frank forwarded your message to IRAF site support (iraf@noao.edu).
IRAF comminucates with SAOimage/XImtool using the protocol originally
designed for IIS image displays. There is no formal documentation we have
on the implementation but there are a number of things you can do: Jim
Wright at CFHT developed a package a while back that implements the IIS
protocol and allows you to write clients ore easily, although I'm not sure
this was completed and is now frozen. A paper describing the package was
presented at ADASS 93, you can get a copy of it on-line at
http://cadcwww.dao.nrc.ca/ADASS/adass_proc/adass3/papers/wrightj/wrightj.html
The software and paper are available from ftp.cfht.hawaii.edu in the
/pub/sao-iis directory.
If you want to see what's being sent then you can compile the
$iraf/unix/sun/fifo.c program. This is a dummy display server that implements
the IIS protocol and simply writes the information read to the screen. In
SAOimage you can also define a DEBUG_IMTOOL unix environment variable and
get the same information. For examples of how the display servers work
with IIS have a look at the iis.c source for XImtool or irafimtl.c in
the SAOimage source.
I hope this helps, if you tell me what it is you're trying to do
I might have more specific suggestions.Regards,
Mike Fitzpatrick

Hi Greg,I have seen your recent mail concerning software to talk to Ximtool or
SAOimage. When your question first came in I thought one of the
sources to point to would be FOCAS though the Wright stuff is more
documented. FOCAS has been able to talk to the display servers for a
long time. It was the first example of a non-IRAF program which used
the display servers (it also works with Sunview/IMTOOL). Look at the
iis files. If compiled with the IRAF libraries it also has the ability
to talk to remote display servers through the IRAF kernel server. So
you don't need to to anything with FOCAS, it does what you are asking
about.The display server protocol is historical. When IRAF first started
FOCAS already existed and talked to an IIS. I did some of the first
implementation of display for IRAF and that was also to an IIS.
So naturally the IIS protocol was needed. When windowing systems
appeared, specifically SunView, we wanted an image display server.
The simplest path to this was to write the server using the IIS
protocol. Other servers came along (SAOimage and then Ximtool) and
they naturally needed to be compatible with IRAF. So in a way there
was a lot of code sharing in using the IIS protocol. However, an
overhaul of the communication protocol is clearly in order now. It
has always been our intent that things like display servers and
graphics terminals be generally useful programs that can be used by
software ourside of the IRAF project.I haven't added anything new to Mike's response but I wanted to
emphasize that FOCAS is a current example of what you want, a
host program that talks to any of the display servers (which all
understand the same protocol).Cheers,
Frank Valdes

>From gpk@research.att.com Mon Apr 1 10:14:37 1996
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 12:11:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Greg Kochanski 582-4706 <gpk@human.att.com>
To: valdes@noao.edu
Subject: Re: How does IRAF talk to Ximtool?Thanks. I should have thought of it.History is certainly a good reason for the current protocols.