Best of luck to you in your future endeavors, and thank you for your many
years of hard work and commitment on netCDF-java and THREDDS. The positive
impact of these tools on the scientific community and the world at large is
immeasurable.
Best,
Shane
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 1:42 PM, John Caron <caron@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Dear THREDDS and Netcdf-Java community:
>
> After a long time of wrestling with this decision, I will be leaving
> Unidata on August 7 to explore other opportunities. My intention is to
> continue working on THREDDS for several more years in some other context,
> possibly as an independent consultant, working directly for other
> organizations to create custom solutions and deployments of the THREDDS
> technology stack.
>
> Unidata will continue to provide the home and core engineering support for
> THREDDS. The THREDDS group (Christian, Dennis, Ryan, Sean) is in the
> strongest position it has ever been to carry this work forward. Unidata
> continues to be institutionally committed to the THREDDS project, both in
> supporting and maintaining the current releases, and in development of new
> capabilities.
>
> Over the past year, we have significantly strengthened THREDDS with unit
> testing, Coverity defect scanning, Github hosting, Jenkins and Travis
> continuous integration, Gradle build management, and Jira issue tracking.
> These software engineering practices are essential to turn the usual morass
> of scientific code into a sustainable project that can survive the
> departure of the founder(s).
>
> This transition is also an opportunity for THREDDS to continue evolving
> into a community supported project, in which many organizations contribute
> features and fixes that benefit one and all. Only with ongoing community
> support can a software project of this magnitude, based in a
> publicly-funded organization, grow and thrive.
>
> Where does THREDDS and Netcdf-Java fit into the technology landscape 16
> years after they began? The software industry has unambiguously chosen
> Java as the server-side technology for large, long-term, complex software
> projects. The reasons for this include the strong-typing of the Java
> language, portability across key hardware platforms, the richness of the
> Java Virtual Machine (JVM) languages, the comprehensive Java development
> tools, and the maturity and efficiency of the JVM implementations. THREDDS
> and Netcdf-Java gain long term viability and sustainability by leveraging
> this core Java technology.
>
> On the client side, Java has been less successful, partly because it
> cannot easily be linked with non-JVM languages such as C, and partly
> because the needs of scientific programmers don’t fit Java’s strengths as
> well. With Python gaining momentum throughout the geosciences, THREDDS
> will be providing, along with the current library used in Java clients, new
> ways for python clients to make use of TDS servers and the CDM Java
> software stack. More details will be coming later this year.
>
> When I leave Unidata, I will be leaving THREDDS in the best shape it has
> ever been in. I am confident in the software, the Unidata THREDDS team,
> and the larger THREDDS community to take this project successfully
> forward. I will take some time to regroup after this transition to decide
> what is next, and how I can best support the project.
>
> Thank you for your ongoing commitment and patient support over these many
> years.
>
> John Caron
>
>
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