20050315: changes to netCDF interface in 1.2 b2

>From: Unidata User Support <address@hidden>
>Organization: Unidata Program Center/UCAR
>Keywords: IDV netCDF

Hi All-

The latest release of the IDV (1.2 beta 2) uses the new
netCDF for Java 2.2 API which differs from the previous
release.  If you have written code against the Java netCDF
library in the IDV, you may find that some of your code
may not work with the new release.  We have tried to maintain
backward compatibility in the IDV so it will work with the
netCDF for Java 2.1 release so if you are writing to the
IDV APIs you should see no change.

For the most part, only the grid reading portion of the
IDV has been affected by this change in this release.
Some particular places where code may break:

- if you have written a parser for your own convention
(i.e. subclass of ucar.nc2.dataset.conv.Convention),
you will need to refactor that to the new API.

- some methods in the GridDataset API have been deprecated.

- the netCDF source code is no longer distributed with the
IDV source.  If you need the netCDF source, you can download
it from the netCDF for Java homepage:

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf-java/index.html

This version of the NetCDF-Java library implements a 
"Common Data Model" (CDM), a generalization of the NetCDF, OpenDAP 
and HDF5 data models.  The new API will allow us to better handle 
new datasets and provide better subsetting capabilities for other 
datasets.  For example, in this release, we can now read GRIB 1
and GRIB 2 files directly through the CDM's GeoGrid API.  

An additional change in this release is to reduce the number
of JAR files that are needed.  We have merged all the necessary
netCDF related code (netCDF 2.2, GRIB, JPEG2000) into nc2.2.jar 
and have merged most of the external packages (Java Media Framework 
(JMF), ImageJ, Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), Java Help, Geotransform) 
into external.jar.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

The IDV Development Team