Subject: Re: grand unified format?

From: [email-masked] (Chris Houck)
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 16:56:57 GMT

[email-masked] (patrick m. ryan) writes:

>	I heard a while back that somewhere there was effort under way to
>unite the disparate elements of HDF, CDF, and netCDF.  Was I imagining
>things or is such a thing happening?

No, you were not imagining things.  A Beta version of HDF 3.3 is currently
on our ftp server (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in HDF/HDF3.3-BETA/hdf3.3b1.tar.Z).
This library provides all of the functionality of HDF 3.2 as well as 
supporting the netCDF interface and a new "multi-file" SDS interface
and a few other nice things like JPeg compression support.

By using either the netCDF interface or the new SDS interface a user
can *transparently* read XDR-based netCDF files, old HDF files and files
created with the other interface.  We are currently working on porting
the library to VMS, the Mac, the PC and the DEC Alpha;  it should work
on most other "standard" platforms already.

Adding support for CDF is something I will be looking into over the
next few months.  That's "looking into" *NOT* "doing" in the near 
term :-)

>	And while we're at it, does anyone have a more helpful HDF browser
>than "hdfls"?  If you ask me, "hdfls" is pretty much useless.

Someone has already suggested NCSA Collage available from the above ftp
server.  If you are only concerned about SDS datasets, you can use the
version of ncdump contained in HDF 3.3 it was developed as a netCDF
tool but when linked with the merged library it is very useful for
dumping the metadata and data contained in a series of SDSs.

>thanks,
>pat

-Chris Houck
HDF Group
NCSA Software Development Group