### Summary of Capabilities and Limitations

Although there is no limitation to the type of command that can be written for the NeXtMidas environment, the system infrastructure is designed to facilitate the creation and execution of commands that perform signal acquisition, processing and display. It is common to see graphical components of an application implemented as one or more NeXtMidas macros that coordinate their activities with number-crunching commands.

NeXtMidas commands that create graphical displays are typically read-only consumers of signal data files. Commands can also create files and/or analyze file contents to calculate characterizing numbers that are stored in the NeXtMidas results table for use by later commands.

NeXtMidas graphics consist of pure-Java code for laying out panels of data plots, list plots and control widgets. NeXtMidas prior to version 1.90 made little use of the Java Swing graphic toolkit because older browsers (Netscape 4.7x and earlier) contained a Java implementation that did not support Swing. Now, however, NeXtMidas version 1.9 (and beyond) integrates Swing for GUI builders, and takes advantage of Swing's power compared to the older Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT).