National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
United States Department of Commerce

Release Notes for Previous Versions

Last modified: Mon, 04/03/2017 - 17:28
This are the release notes for previous releases of LAS and LAS Armstrong.

"Armstrong": What's in a name?

The development of LAS switched technologies at the end of LAS6.5.2.1. The LAS 6.x product server code is written in Perl and usesCGI technology for its interface to the Web. In version 6.x the userinteracts with a Java servlet we call the user interface server. After6.x we started a reworking of the product server using Java and at thesame time began planning for a reworking of the UI code as well. Itdawned on use shortly after we started that we could continue to usethe old v6.x user interface code, but hook it up to the new Javaproduct server. We did that and began releasing Beta versions of this combination under the code name "Armstrong". Work on the new userinterface has continued along and an alpha release (see the notes below) of this code is now included in the release.

In sum:

Release Product Server User Interface Notes
LAS 6.5.2.1 Perl CGI Java Servlet Use Armstrong 1.0 instead.
Armstrong Beta Java Servlet + Web Services Java Servlet v6.5x UI and Java Product Server.

Upgrade these to Armstrong 1.0.
Armstrong 1.0 and above Java Servlet + Web Services Java Servlet Stable, fully functional with all the same features and more as LAS 6.5x using the 6.5 UI and the Java Product Server.

Combined release with v7.0 Alpha
LAS v7.0 Alpha1 Java Servlet + Web Services Web 2.0 Client Combined release with Armstrong 1.0.
LAS v7.0 Java Servlet + Web Services Web 2.0
Client		 Coming soon.

 

LAS v7.0 Alpha (Armstrong 1.1 plus the v7.0 UI (Alpha)) (11/2007)

This release contains the same components as 1.0.

This is a features and bug fix release for the classic userinterface and the product server. The Alpha release of the version 7user interface is unchanged with this release.

New Features

  1. Support for WMS requests to an LAS
  2. Comparisons are now allowed where one or both of the operands are user defined variables.
  3. Better defaults for animation initialization and contour levels.
  4. All 2D views allow an interactive plot that allows the user to select a new zoom region directly on the plot.
  5. New documentation for configuring data sets with curvilinear coordinates or hybrid-z vertical coordinates.
  6. Command-line testing tool can be used to test LAS availability. Tests can be scripted and run by cron jobs.
  7. Wherepossible date selections are now controlled by "smart" widgets thatprevent dates outside the time range or illegal dates from beingselected.
  8. Automatic striding of data selection applied when plotting from extremely high resolution data sources.
  9. Numerous bug fixes.

Please note:

The prerequisites page lists all the other software you need for this version of LAS (including an upgrade to Ferret 6.08).

 

LAS v7.0 Alpha (Armstrong 1.0 plus the v7.0 UI (Alpha)) (8/2007)

 

This release has a new prerequisite.

This release contains:

Software Notes
Armstrong 1.0 a fully featured product server attached to the previous version of the user interface
LAS v7.0 Alpha User Interface1 an early alpha release of the new Web 2.0 JavaScript user interface
F-TDS LAS integrated with TDS so that all LAS gridded data (even local files) that are configured into LAS to be served via OPeNDAP. This release also used the dynamic analysis capabilities of F-TDS to re-griddata when making comparisons between different grids and to do the analysis necessary for user defined variables
JavaScript components A suite of javascript compoents is provided that can be used by developers to create customized LAS user interfaces or interactive products. Plese see the Javascript Components 2.x page in the developer documentation for more information.

Notes:

  1. Products integrated with Google Earth so that dynamicXY plots, vector plots and grid location place marks can all be displayed directly form LAS to GE.
  2. Animations can be created and displayed in any browser.
  3. The new "Slide sorter" allows rapid comparison of closely related fields. (This product is named "~ plot comparison" in the UI.)
  4. Added new backend service that allows data to obtained from Dapper servers (contributed by Bob Simons).
  5. F-TDS server for comparison, user defined variables and remote LAS data access.
  6. Products can be returned to a client as a JSON Object, an XML document or an HTML page.
  7. Completed all services need for the Web 2.0 User Interface.
  8. Error message configuration and editing now available for the Ferret Backend Service.
  9. Interactive XY plotting with zoom-in and zoom-out.

Required changes to dataset configuration files:

  1. Climatological axes defined as menus with values of <v>Jan</v>, <v>Feb</v>, etc. must be converted to <v label="Jan">15-Jan</v>, <v label="Feb">15-Feb</v>, etc.
  2. Please note the prerequisites page which list all the other software you need for this version of LAS (including Ferret 6.07+ and F-TDS 3.16+)

Bug fixes:

This release contains numerous bug fixes over the Beta 0.4 code.

1The v7.0 UI: a transitional step

The v7.0 user interface, released as an Alpha product here in together with the Armstrong package, is a transitional step. The v7.0UI incorporates new and more flexible programming paradigms (e.g. Ajax),while retaining major elements of the style of user interactions found in v6. For example the v7.0 UI has retained the characteristics of theLAS v6 UI that require the user to understand the abstraction of a"VIEW" (e.g. select from lat-long, lat-depth, depth-time, ...). With the release of v7.1 support for the v6/Armstrong UI will be dropped altogether (though the XML configuration files will be backward compatible to the greatest degree that is feasible). Significant advances will be incorporated in how the user will interact with the UI. The improvements to the UI are a work in progress at the present time. Suggestions and discussion are welcome at las_users@noaa.gov

Armstrong Beta 0.4 (4/16/07)

Notes:

  1. Initial implementation of Web 2.0 services (getOperations)
  2. Added new service to generate KML files from LAS products.
  3. Added option to request email notification and monitor an RSS feed for long running requests.
  4. Fixed error handling for long running requests so when user comes back to are quest that took a long time but ended in an error the user gets a notification of the error with an option to re-submit the request.Previously when the user came back the long job was immediately re-submitted.

Armstrong Beta 0.3 (3/12/07)

Notes:

  1. Improvements to plotting for overlays.
  2. Improved options for marking grid points.
  3. Added "Evaluate Expression" capability.
  4. Added backend service for reading data from an OPeNDAP DRDS server. (Contributed by Bob Simons)
  5. Added capability to run the Ferret backend service remotely (other services do not have this capability).

Armstrong Beta 0.2 (10/26/06)

Notes:

  1. Fixed a bug in the caching algorithm to handle compound operations.
  2. Improvements/fixes to how constraints are communicated to the backend services.
  3. Added configuration and code to allow some properties to be excluded from a backend service request so that the cache key does not get polluted by properties that don't apply. The canonical example is excluding the Ferret plotting properties from a database request so that subsequent request for new plots with different options on the same data allow the data to be retrieved from the local cache.
  4. Eliminated some dead Perl code for testing LAS installations.
  5. Fixed the XY plot options so it has the richer set associated with lat/lonplots (ArcView output and land type choices for example).

Armstrong Beta 0.1 (10/20/06)

This was the initial release of Armstrong.