Re: [netcdf-java] announce: release candidate 2 for Netcdf-Java version 4.0

Doug Lindholm wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> I'm planning to give 4.0 a try. I've run into a few questions:
>
> - I'm not seeing all the packages described in the javadoc
> (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/v4.0/javadocAll/index.html)
>
> in netcdf-4.0.jar (or even netcdfAll-4.0.jar). In particular, I though I
> might want to play with thredds.catalog2.

catalog2 is not ready for release, so we removed it from jar. probably should
remove from javadoc to
avoid confusion. but i could leave it in the src so you can look at if you
want.

>
> - I grabbed the source from ncSrc-4.0.zip and got it going in eclipse.
> Is stax-api-1.0.1.jar needed? My jdk (1.6) already has javax.xml and the
> XMLConstants in stax-api-1.0.1.jar appears to be incompatible with your
> usage (e.g. in CatalogNamespace).

yes, its there for jdk 1.5 users which we unfortunately are still supporting
(pathetic MAC users
;^). so not needed for 1.6

>
> - Is the opendap jar consistent with the scm.opendap.org/svn repository?

yes, but they dont seem to be releasing any jar files.


>
> Here's what I'm doing. I have extended the opendap java code to make a
> customized time series server. I am using DAP Sequences to package the
> data. Our data are in HDF5 files and I have NcML files for them which I
> use to read the data into the server via the NetCDF APIs. We also have
> simple binary files for which I plan to implement an IOServiceProvider
> so I can use the NcML approach with them. I'm also overriding the
> default ascii output for Sequences to produce csv formatted output for
> easier integration with spreadsheets.

that sounds very cool. Im working on point data reading, send me a URL so I can
see what it looks like.

as you've noticed, we arent handling sequences yet in NcDODSServlet. Is your
code general enough
that we might want to incorporate? Or am i misunderstanding what you have
done?

>
> My next step is to make use of some THREDDS catalogs. I might start with
> the TDS but I suspect that I'm going to want to customize the hell out
> of the data set html presentation. That's where I thought I might just
> take control and roll my own catalog code based on thredds.catalog2. The
> other option is to extend the TDS code, but I gather that you do not
> release that (and if I got a copy, I couldn't count on a stable API).

we do release it to people we know, just not to bad people.

we have some plans for allowing user-pluggable HTML rendering. What if we gave
you a way to plug in
your code that took a catalog or dataset and did the rendering for it?

We are doing a lot of refactoring right now for a 4.0 release. I cc:ing ethan
since he's working on
that.