Section: 5.7 Architecture of NetCDF APIs and Libraries

5.7 Architecture of NetCDF APIs and Libraries

Knowing how netCDF APIs are layered is sometimes useful for understanding performance and error handling.

Layering architecture of netCDF-3 libraries and applications:

Only two independent implementations: C and Java
Other APIs call C library
Fortran-90 library could be modified to call C library directly, with some work, for not much benefit
Support for netCDF-2 APIs for C and Fortran77 not shown, layered on top of netCDF-3 libraries to support legacy applications

Looking Ahead: NetCDF-4 Architecture

All netCDF-3 applications will be supported without change
Only the C, Fortran-77, and Fortran-90, and Python libraries are currently available for netCDF-4 (Python netCDF-4 library not shown)
NetCDF-4 libraries for Java and C++ are under development