The THREDDS Development Team is preparing for the release of the first public beta of version 5 of the THREDDS Data Server (TDS), scheduled on or before March 19th, 2018. TDS v5 includes some major under-the-hood changes, which we will detail in the release notice. A beta version of netCDF-Java v5 will be announced at some point after the first stable release of the TDS v5.
For users who access data from http://thredds.ucar.edu, we will be running a public test server where you can exercise your scripts, libraries, applications, etc. We will work with you to make the transition to this new version as smooth as possible. It's important to note that the earliest we will be upgrading the thredds.ucar.edu server to the newest version is the end of May 2018, but that assumes any issues brought to light through the beta testing process, by both those running the TDS and those who access data from Unidata's TDS, are addressed. If we do not hit the target of the end of May 2018, the next upgrade window would be early August, 2018. (We chose the “end of May” and “beginning of August” timeframes to minimize impacts on the University community, specifically those in the trenches of teaching.)
Beta testing feedback from users running a TDS would be greatly appreciated, as we at Unidata do not run a TDS that regularly exercises all of the capabilities it currently has to offer (although we are working on that).
While these new features are exciting (especially the end-user visible changes), our main goal is to make sure TDS 5.0 is at least feature compatible with the current TDS 4.6 branch, even though in some cases the underlying libraries have changed (e.g. the new ncWMS server and Godiva3 client).
Finally, as part of the beta release of TDS 5.0, we are taking this opportunity to move to a more standard, more open license for both netCDF-Java and the TDS. More information on the license change can be found in this blog post on the Unidata Developers’ blog.
