CDF Staff Receive Award as Updates Continue

Continuing Improvements

Continuing improvements include those made to the CDF data access tools used in the World Wide Web (WWW)-based OMNIWeb Data System and to the CDF Home Page. The CDF access tools have been reused and extended to handle multiple CDFs for the NSSDC Coordinated Heliospheric Observations (COHO) data in the COHOWeb Data System. OMNIWeb and COHOWeb provide an interactive interface for data retrieval and visualization that brings the scientific data to the researcher over the Internet. IDL is used in both systems as a graphics engine to generate plots of the selected CDFs. The CDF Home Page ( http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cdf/cdf_home.html ) has been updated with a "What's New" page and an introduction to the CDF User's Mailing List. There are plans to convert the CDF User's Guide and References from LaTex into HTML and make it available from the WWW as a context-sensitive document.

Software Improvements

Software-related improvements include the following:

• A new method of including the CDF constants used with the CDF/IDL interface was developed to ease the problem of too many local variables in an IDL function/procedure. The constants are contained in structures rather than as individual variables.
• Support for the IRIX 5.x operating system was added to the distribution.
• Match control parameters were added for the shareable CDF library on VMS systems. This will allow applications linked to the shareable CDF library to use new revisions of the library without having to be relinked (except in those cases where relinking is mandatory).
• Work began on CDFexport. CDFexport will allow CDFs to be exported in a variety of formats and will eventually replace CDFlist.
• Changes were necessary to CDF's IDL interface because of differences between IDL 3.x and IDL 4.0.
• The use of extended (virtual) memory on the IBM PC under Microsoft C 7.00 was implemented. Initial testing was successful with the exception of the Curses-based toolkit programs and the Fortran test programs. Those problems will be investigated.
• The CDF Version 2.5 distribution was modified for the POSIX-compliant C compiler (c89) on the HP.

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