NetCDF Status Report, September 1996

• Harvey Davies worked with us from January through August in designing and implementing new netCDF-3 interfaces and netCDF-4 plans.

• Russ and Harvey made presentations to IITA and FSL on plans for netCDF-3 and netCDF-4, incorporating feedback into our release plans and development schedule.

• Harvey released a new version of his FAN library that provides much of the functionality originally specified for the netCDF operators packages.

• Version 2.4.3 of netCDF was released on 12 August. Release notes are available from the netCDF What's New page at http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/whatsnew.html

• Glenn and Harvey rewrote the netCDF library, eliminating its dependence on XDR, cleanly separating internal from external types, speeding it up significantly, and modernizing its interface to provide type conversion and type safety. The resulting alpha version of netCDF-3 was released on 30 August. A detailed transition guide is available from the What's New page.

• Steve provided a new and improved implementation of Fortran jackets that will simplify maintenance of the Fortran interface for various Fortran-to-C calling interfaces.

• Joe Sirott made available a portable Java implementation of a read-only netCDF interface. We've been working on testing this and getting it ready for release.

• Before a final version of netCDF-3 is released, we need to finish implementing the new Fortran interface and writing a new User's Guide.