Accessing Remote Data Servers through Java

The Unidata Program Center (UPC), Space Science Engineering Center (SSEC) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) are in the process of developing applications written in Java for their respective clients. A portion of the development has been focused on remote access to meteorological datasets. As part of the solution, these three groups have collaboratively developed a Java-based interface to the Abstract Data Distribution Environment (ADDE). ADDE, based on a client-server data access model, was developed at SSEC to enable McIDAS users to browse and retrieve McIDAS data sets on remote servers. The ADDE model also allows the use of subservers to provide access to non-McIDAS formatted data (i.e., NIDS, MODIS, netCDF, Oracle/NEONS). The Java ADDE client was developed to allow applications access to data from ADDE servers without the need to run McIDAS on the client machine, and as a way of providing the new generation Java tools with immediate access to real time datasets already in use. In addition to the remote data access, applications which use these classes allow educators, researchers, and forecasters to collaborate more easily by sharing datasets.

This paper describes the technical details of the Java ADDE client and presents examples of the use of this in software being developed by the three groups.