1. 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 2008-2011; 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 The outdated NDS-PUB program needs to be replaced in the long run.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.

4. Jun Chen’s comments.. Cons: No final stable version is available since no one has worked on it since 2011-2012. 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”.

5. 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.