On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Mark Taylor wrote:
> [My understanding of] the point of NDX/HDX is mainly to allow structured
> access to data in a wide variety of interoperable storage/transmission
> formats - importantly, so that you can view data someone else has archived
> in a way that makes sense in a data model beyond what they had in mind.
> In the kind of closed environment which I imagine you're thinking of
> with SCUBA-2 (you know where the files are coming from, what format
> they're in, and where they've got to go to) I'm not sure how much
> the HDX/NDX view of things buys you.
>
Yes. If we were to switch to FITS our data model would have to remain
identical to the view that we would provide from NDF (including how all
the extensions are arranged).
> If what you need is an NDF-library-independent way of accessing
> array data stored in NDF files, you are probably better off tackling
> that directly than implementing HDX/NDX in C, though certainly it
> would make sense to do it with an eye on HDX/NDX to facilitate
> interoperability.
Am I correct in thinking that the advice from this list for new
applications is to
1. Do all the high level abstraction in Java
2. Do the numerical algorithms in C
3. Use SOAP
?
--
Tim Jenness
JAC software
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj
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