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Re: Future of Scientific Feature Types

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  • Subject: Re: Future of Scientific Feature Types
  • Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:01:30 -0600
Hi Arnaud:

We are planning on continued work on the Scientific Feature Types into the 
foreseeable future. The APIs may continue to be tweaked, and youve already seen 
that the implementations are still green. But we will respond quickly to bug 
reports, so your help would be very welcome, along with ideas on how to improve 
the interfaces.

John

Arnaud Dumont wrote:
> John,
> 
> Here's a little background:
>     I'm extending our Jade visualization framework to support
> loading/rendering of features (point and trajectory obs and point
> forecasts) that have been encoded in NetCDF. I was hoping to use your
> Scientific Feature Types Java API, but I can't get it to work. After
> several days of trying to incorporate your API, I can load the datasets
> and create FeatureDatasets, but I can't iterate over them without
> throwing an exception deep in the Structure's readData() code. I filed a
> bug separately, but that is not why I'm writing you.
> 
> Now to get to the point:
>     What I really want to know is whether the Scientific Feature Types
> code you've written will continue to be supported and updated in future
> releases of the NetCDF Java API? If so, I may be designing my code to
> implement some of your interfaces directly (as I think they are
> conceptually accurate). This will simplify my work now and provide for
> easy refactoring to use your classes in some future release. If not, I
> will probably develop a very similar design that doesn't leverage any of
> your interfaces.
> 
>     I know nothing's ever set in stone, but can you give me an idea of
> whether the FeatureCollections and such will be around for a while?
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Arnaud
> ---
> Arnaud Dumont
> National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
> Research Applications Laboratory (RAL)
> 3450 Mitchell Ln
> Boulder, CO 80301
> address@hidden
> +1(303)497-8434