  In this talk we will review the major additions and improvements made to the
ROOT system in the last 18 months and present our plans for future
developments. The additons and improvements range from modifications to the I/O
sub-system to allow users to save and restore objects of classes that have not
been instrumented by special ROOT macros, to the addition of a geometry package
designed for building, browsing, tracking and visualizing detector geometries.
Other improvements include enhancements to the quick analysis sub-system
(TTree::Draw()), the addition of classes that allow inter-file object
references (TRef, TRefArray), better support for templated and STL classes,
amelioration of the Automatic Script Compiler and the incorporation of new
fitting and mathematical tools. Efforts have also been made to increase the
modularity of the ROOT system with the introduction of more abstract interfaces
and the development of a plug-in manager. In the near future, we intend to
continue the development of PROOF and its interfacing with GRID environments.
We plan on providing an interface between Geant3, Geant4 and Fluka and the new
geometry package. The ROOT GUI classes will finally be available on Windows and
we plan to release a GUI inspector and builder. In the last year, ROOT has
drawn the endorsement of additional experiments and institutions. It is now
officially supported by CERN and used as key I/O component by the LCG project.
