LabVIEW is a powerful graphical programming language initially developed by National Instruments in 1986. The current version, version 7.1 was launched in July 2004.

LabVIEWs development environment and language has been specifically tailored to meet the demands of a very broad range of technical program development. The very comprehensive set of tools is ideal for the efficient development of data acquisition, test and control solutions. There is even a realtime version for time critical applications. See http://www.ni.com/aap/ for more details.

Who uses LabVIEW? Labview has a diverse range of users from all branches of science and industry. It is extensively used for production test, in process control and anywhere there is a requirement to collect and process data. Its application is not limited to a particular industry or scientific discipline.

What platforms does it support? The LabVIEW development environment runs on all versions of MS Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OSX.

Why use LabVIEW? LabVIEW is the ideal tool for developing any application that requires input from sensors or instrumentation . It has the most comprehensive set of tools and high level functionality of any software tool for interfacing to data acquisition modules and instrumentation. There is a library of over 1000 different instrument drivers available for providing high level access to instrumentation. It provided a huge set of tools for analysing the data, powerful GUI and data presentation capabilities.

Can use existing code within LabVIEW? LabVIEW can call existing code which has been compiled into DLLs or object files.

Is LabVIEW fast enough for my application? LabVIEW features a unique graphical compiler. Its performance is considered to be comparable to compiled C code. Its inherent parallelism means that it is easy to separate time critical areas from the main code. In addition there is a real time variant of the software, with deterministic performance that runs directly on DAQ hardware.

What reporting facilities does it have? LabVIEW has built-in report generation that formats reports direct to a printer or to an HTML document. There are also add-on packages that provide high-level access to MS Word and MS Excel.

Can I interface to my database? Can I interface to my database? Database access is provided to any database that can be accessed using OLE DB or ODBC connectivity, this includes the Open Source database MySQL www.mysql.com/

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