IPAC Firefly Development Roadmap

The IPAC Firefly package has been developed in IRSA (NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive) in the last six years. It is a software package utilizing state-of-the-art AJAX technology to provide an interactive web user interface for astronomers. It has been used to build Spitzer Heritage Archive, WISE Image Service, Planck Visualization, PTF Image Service, and the new IRSA finder chart. It provides three major components: table display, FITS images visualization, and 2D plot. All three highly interactive components can work together using the same data model or separately to provide any combination of interactivity among them. Firefly toolkits provide an easy way to add interactivity to an otherwise static web page. With a few lines of simple JavaScript embedded in a web page, Firefly toolkits can add manipulative functions to a static table, display a FITS image, or draw an XY 2D plot interactively. At 2015 AAS, we announced that Firefly will be open source under BSD 3-clause license. It is now available on GitHub(1) IPAC is now responsible for development of LSST Science User Interface/Tools(SUI/T). To satisfy LSST user requirements and to give users more flexibility to build a customized user interface to their specific science needs, we plan to extend Firefly - add more visualization functionalities; make its components more independently accessible; enable users to display images, tables, and 2D XY plots within iPython notebook; allow Firefly tools to be controlled by Python script. In this talk, we will outline the development roadmap with detailed functions and features in next three years.