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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
> I'm interested in hearing about other efforts to provide Java interfaces to > netCDF data or array-oriented data visualization tools in Java. > > - --Russ > > ______________________________________________________________________________ > be to researchers? Suppose that an analysis program like Ferret or IDL > could be used to read the same dataset - would the Java browsers still > be useful? > An interface to Java per se would be no more interesting than, say, the C++ interface. (that is to say, exciting only to the programmers). I dont know what Ferret is, but IDL is proprietary and has significant weaknesses as a universal data visualizer. The possibly new capability would be to provide data browsing on the web. This could be useful if it lowers the (currently high) barriers to visualizing other peoples's datasets. I guess that the main technical problem (besides the hard work of writing data browsers) is the data transfer. At NCAR, we have gazigabytes of data. We often use rather outdated batch mode "visualizers" in order to deal with the large amounts of data. A better approach is with a data server that can extract desired subsets of the data to visualizer clients. If this is fast enough, then you can extract just what you need to draw the next picture, and still get interactive browsing. Java might be a reasonable language to implement the clientside browser. Although the AWT toolkit is immature, without a doubt third party GUI builders will become available. It is important to think about how the data server side should fit in. I know there is a proposal to extend NFS protocols over the Web. It would be interesting to see how fast this might be. A data server that also provides data compression, data operators, derived fields, etc could be a Very Good Thing if it became a standard. Then, you'd run your netcdf-server daemon along with your http daemon. I know there are lots of ways to skin this cat, and many are thinking about this question. Obviously, the key is standardization. I'd be interested in hearing what others think about web data access.
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