JCDF library

[Mark Taylor]

Dear apps,

This is to announce the release of a JCDF, a new pure java library
for reading CDF files.  CDF (Common Data Format) is a binary file format
defined by NASA (http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/), typically but not
necessarily containing time series data, and used for a number of
space science and solar missions. NASA provide a comprehensive official
I/O library in C with various language bindings including Java,
but that means that the corresponding Java library uses JNI requiring
native libraries, which is a barrier for use by pure java applications.

I've developed JCDF to allow TOPCAT/STILTS/STIL (which are pure java)
to read CDFs (this functionality is present in the most recent releases
of those packages).  However, the library is completely standalone,
and anybody else who wants to read CDFs from Java might find it
useful.  I don't know if there is anybody who wants to do that,
but this announcement is just in case.  Note that JCDF can only
read CDFs, it makes no attempt to write them.

More info:

   Web page:   http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/jcdf/
   Github:     https://github.com/mbtaylor/jcdf

Any feedback, questions, functionality requests etc welcome, mail me.
If anybody does use this, I'd be interested to know.

This work has been funded by the science archive group at ESAC
(thanks Pedro!)

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/