History

The idea of writing public release of the code originated when one of us (PJF) was visiting Princeton in 1990. The name DDSCAT was coined by us at that time. Our only joint picture is below. It was taken while working on the DDSCAT release 7 at Princeton, July 2007. In that time we were converting the code to FORTRAN90, worked on periodic structures, and improved the conjugate gradient solver.

The review paper Draine, B.T., & Flatau, P.J., "Discrete dipole approximation for scattering calculations", J. Opt. Soc. Am. A, 11, 1491-1499 (1994) contains basic introduction to DDA. In 2007 The Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA) included it in their list of the 50 most-cited JOSA papers and made it freeley available http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=josaa-11-4-1491

In the fall of 2011 we worked on the fast near field calculations as well as capabilities to display shapes and results using modern three dimensional graphical software such as Mayavi2 or Paraview. We published paper about this in Optics Express. In February 2012, around Valentine's day, we release version 7.2 to public. We added support for the VTK graphical file format generation and converted DDSCAT to subroutine. We also worked on improvements to native Windows release and switched from G95 to gfortran in the process.