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1.9 The Future of NetCDF

NetCDF continues under active development at Unidata (see http://www.unidata.ucar.edu).

The upcoming and long anticipated release of netCDF-4.0 will introduce another format: HDF5. This does not represent the weakening of support for the classic and 64-bit offset formats! NetCDF-4.0 will maintain full backward compatibility, and will continue to use classic format by default. NetCDF-4.0 will introduce many interesting new features, such as groups and compound data types, which will only be available for files using the HDF5 format. Classic and 64-bit offset files will behave as always, and will be fully supported in netCDF-4.

NetCDF-4 is in advanced alpha release, and adventurous users can try it out for themselves, but it is not ready for operational use and won't be until HDF5 1.8.0 is released. See http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/netcdf-4.

The netCDF-Java library has many advanced capabilities, and is actively maintained and developed. See http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/v2.1/NetcdfJavaUserManual.htm.