Developers of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) traveled to the University of Wisconsin, Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) in late November to meet with developers of SSEC's Man-computer Interactive Data Access System Fifth Generation (McIDAS-V) package. Discussion during the meeting focused on ways the two teams can collaborate more closely and avoid duplicating development effort.
Unidata's IDV and SSEC's McIDAS-V share a great deal already. The IDV relies heavily on the VisAD visualization library, a Java component library originally developed at SSEC by Bill Hibbard. The McIDAS-V application, in turn, is largely based on the IDV. Developers of the two applications have a long history of cooperation and code-sharing, but the projects have not been formally linked.
The goal of November's meetings was to find ways for the IDV and McIDAS-V development teams to collaborate more effectively. Some of the high-level proposals were:
- To initiate monthly development teleconferences, to facilitate planning and coordination between the teams
- To investigate bringing features of SSEC's HYperspectral viewer for Development of Research Applications (HYDRA) package into IDV, either via a plugin or by integrating them into IDV's core
- To work towards integrating various other features present in either the IDV or McIDAS-V into the combined project.
- To investigate setting up a collaborative testing environment
- To form a project management committee with representatives from different groups (the Unidata Program Center, SSEC, and external developers), and to look into using a distributed project management system.
- To work toward moving the IDV and McIDAS-V source repositories to GitHub.
In keeping with Unidata's move towards an open and collaborative development environment, once the IDV/McIDAS-V source repositories are hosted on a public server, the development team will be inviting participation and contributions from the larger IDV/McIDAS-V community.
