Overview of the LCG applications area software projects

The Applications Area of the LHC Computing Grid Project (LCG) develops part of the physics applications software and associated infrastructure that can be shared among the LHC experiments. The scope includes common applications software infrastructure, frameworks, libraries and tools, together with domain specific components such as simulation and analysis toolkits. The work of the applications area is conducted within a number of projects: software process and infrastructure (SPI), persistency framework (POOL), core libraries and services (SEAL), physicist interface (PI), and simulation (SIMU). ROOT, which is a general purpose object oriented framework that implements software for managing object persistency and for supporting interactive data analysis and visualization, is also used to implement vital parts of Applications Area software. The project has been in an active development phase for more than 2 years and is being integrated by the experiments in their frameworks on which they base the applications used in their data challenges. An overview of the project is given, together with first experience in its use and an outlook on future plans.