Section: 25.1 Near-term plans for netCDF

25.1 Near-term plans for netCDF

Plans for 4.1 and 4.2 releases are fairly concrete

Our plans are constrained by two strong backward compatibility constraints:

Don't break archives: new library software must be able to access previous netCDF data
Don't break programs: new libraries must support previous APIs

Release 4.1 is planned for autumn 2009, and we hope to include:

Optional built-in DAP client support for classic model, for efficient remote access to subsets of netCDF data
nc-config utility, providing version information, compile flags, and library flags for building C and Fortran software
A generic nccopy utility supporting netCDF-4 features and efficient format conversions
Experimental new contributed C++ API for netCDF-4 support
Documentation providing guidance for use of compression and chunking
ncgen4 generation of Fortran-90 code in addition to C code
Implement and test netCDF simple record streaming as specified in standards RFC submission.

Release 4.2, currently planned for late spring 2010, is planned to include:

Testing and possible incorporation of contributed pnetcdf format variant exploiting 64-bit size_t, permitting dimensions larger than 2³² and no practical limits on variable size
Disciplined thread safety, if each thread opens file(s) separately
Upgraded Fortran support for new Fortran-to-C interoperability interfaces standardixed in Fortran 2003
Optional built-in DAP client support for enhanced netCDF-4 data model, for efficient remote access to netCDF subsets
Hooks to allow plug-in extensions for other formats, as supported by IOSP interfaces in netCDF-Java
Examples that use new observational conventions
Definition of streaming infrastructure for Common Data Model
Definition of DAP4 partitioning and filtering representations
Documentation for netCDF-4 attribute conventions
Checking of UTF-8 encoding when storing string values
Factoring out commonalities in netCDF utilities to a robust utility library
Provision of iterator-like interfaces for access to variable-length types
Addition of support for user blocks at the beginning of netCCDF-4 files, for HDF5 compatibility
Investigation of plug-in extensions for classic format to include support for unsigned and 64-bit numeric types and a bounded string type.