Version 4.0.0 (1 Feb 2010)

This version of dap-server contains only C++ code intended for use
with Hyrax (well, except for the old ais-tool code, but that's not
really relevant). The old Perl code that implemented the data server
based on the CGI specification is gone. We have removed all of the
support for that server from the handlers.

There are many bug fixes in this software; see ChangeLog.

version 3.9.3 (9 June 2009)

Fixes for ticket 1301, which address problems with the ASCII representation
of Grids and Sequences. I've added the dap_asciival exec back in to keep the
RPMs from breaking, but I suspect the tests may still not work. Those are
testing the old CGI code, which nobody should be using anymore and which will
be removed for the next major release.

Version 3.9.2 (16 March 2009)

Fixed the 'netCDF' button in the HTML form.

version 3.9.1 (5 Feb 2009)

Build fix - a libxml2 include file was not being found.

version 3.9.0 (29 Jan 2009)

Bug fixes and updates to work with the new libdap and bes changes.

The HTML Form interface now works correctly with data sets that use the same
field names in doubly-nested structures.

The Form also now shows the type information for a Grid.

Version 3.8.5 (03 Mar 2008)

pkg build update to automate the creation of the .pkg and .dmg files using
PackageManager and DropDMG respectively.

Updated libdap usage to include libdap namespace.

General bug fixes.

Version 3.8.4 (03 Dec 2007)

pkg and rpm build fixes

Version 3.8.3 (14 Nov 2007)

HDF5 Structure arrays now print correctly.

Information added to README and INSTALL about the sample data and
quasi-automatic configuration script (bes-dap-data.sh).

Now supports using the new libdap iostream methods.

Various fixes.

Version 3.8.2 (3 July 2007)

Changes to sanitize input to the ASCII, WWW and Usage handlers when they are
run as part of the CGI-based server. Also repaired some resource-release
issues. 

Version 3.8.1 (28 June 2007)

Applied the security patch from 27 April and removed the dodster Perl
software (the patch simply disabled it). The dodster code also used curl in
the same way that the directory listing software and also had a security
vulnerability. 

I set the version for this release to 3.8.1, not 3.8.0 since users of the
server were instructed to set teh version number of the server to 3.8.0 after
they applied the patch.

Version 3.7.4 (13 March 2007)

Fixed a bug in AsciiArray that showed up in the unit tests. The problem was
that the vector values for dimensions were off by one. Also, we only need the
_redirect object for _values_, not for the dinensions (since the constructor
that builds an instance from a BaseType * copies the dimensions).

Added files for the test data and auto configuration ticket. The handlers now
'auto configure' meaning that when you type make install the bes.conf file is
edited so that the bes will ind the newly installed handlers. This _should_
work with the RPM version, too. The script is set to run once only, so
subsequent installs will not modify the bes.conf file.

Fixed bug #347: HDF-EOS attributes did not show up in the HTML form
interface. The problem was that HDF-EOS attributes use conventions that the
WWW Response Handler did not recognize. I modified the Response Handler so
that it works with a DDX (i.e., a DDS loaded with attributes) and that fixes
the problem, given that the form generator code already knew how to deal with
nested attributes. One consequnce of this is that the attributes names in the
Global Attributes section of the HTML now are prefaced with the names of
various global attribute containers.

I split up the README into README.cgi and README.hyrax so that the
information about settig up the CGI server would be put in the dap-server-cgi
package and so that the regular package would have a decent README. I also
fixed some libgering issues in the spec file and Makefile.am

Version 3.7.3

This version cotains a fix for bug 766 where Grid dimensions did not show
up in the HTML form interface. This problem was caused by an error in the way
variables contained in a DDS built by a handler (e.g., the netcdf handler)
were transformed into variables which could generate the form. The same 
sort of problem (with variable transformation) was fixed in the ascii response
code, too.

Version 3.7.2

This version includes bug fixes, performance enhancements and memory leak
fixes. No new features have been added.

Version 3.7.1

We (I) hosed the source distribution; the www interface would not build the
javascript.h file. Patrick and Nathan fixed this.

Version 3.7.0

This version includes a number of improvements/features/fixes needed for
Server4. The BES (soon to be named besdaemon) now supports its own ascii,
html and info commands using plugins built from this code. Previous versions
of server4 used the Java front end to return these responses.

Version 3.6.1

Fixed a bug where the helper that builds the info response was not getting
the cache_dir param (so the hdf4 handler would dump the cache files in the
same directory as the data _or_ exit with a very obscure error message).

The server should now return an error message when the configuration file
cannot be read.

The configuration file now supports data handler switches. Include these 
right after the handler name in the configuration file. 

Two formatting errors in the HTML form generator were fixed.

Added common_tests.exp to the distribution.

Version 3.6.0

This package no longer includes its own copy of the Perl HTML::Parser
module. The FilterDirHTML code now uses the current distribution's version
of the Filter.pm module. That module is deprecated, so we'll need to rewrite
our code or come up with a different solution. I hope that before too long 
our servers will all use THREDDS catalogs in place of the 'filtered HTML'
approach.

In the past the Web Interface (or HTML response) used its own built-in help
text. This was fairly simple and not very helpful. I changed the interface
so that it now uses a web page stored at the opendap web site.

The dap_asciival filter now uses a new variant of the Response class which
reads and stores the version number correctly.

This code has been updated to use libdap 3.6.0.

Fixed a bug where getting data without providing a constraint expression 
failed.

Version 3.5.3

ASCII returns for entire data source (i.e., with an empty Constraint 
expression) were failing. Fixed.

There were packaing problems with the included HTML Parser code. Fixed.

New to this distribtion in the opendap_apache.conf file. Edit this, replacing
<<prefix>> with the installaion prefix for your code and drop the file into 
Apache's configuration file directory (/etc/httpd/conf.d on many linux 
distributions) and restart Apache. No need to edit your main httpd.conf file!

Version 3.5.2

A bug in the HTML form and info response generators caused global attributes 
to be 'lost.'

Support for bzip2 compression was added to the server. If the gzip and bzip2
tools are not located in /bin or /usr/bin on the server host, edit the file
DODS_Cache.pm so that module will be able to locate them.

Version 3.5.1

Based on some testing I'm switching back to including HTML:Parser in the 
distribution since newer versions don't work with our code. This should be
fixed soon enough (3.6. hopefully).

The version 3.5 server has a very different installation layout than previous
versions. Now only the nph-dods CGI script and its configuration file are
installed in a CGI bin directory. The other files are installed in
/usr/local/share/dap-server and /usr/local/bin. See INSTALL for information
about changing the prefix '/usr/local'.

Also, it's no longer a requirement that data be stored under the WWW daemon's
DocumentRoot. See the section about the configuration parameter 'data_root'
in the README file.

This version of the server will pass off a request for the DDX response to 
the format handlers. Currently only the hdf4 and NetCDF handlers can return
the response, the others return an error. This feature and the DDX objects
themselves are prototype versions. We may change the design before releasing 
a final version.

Bug fixes

* The compiled server binaries are no longer installed in $prefix/sbin but in
$prefix/bin.

* The ASCII and HTML responses are now built using local calls to the file
system instead of network calls to the server. This means that those
responses are more efficient and that secure servers are easier to configure.
The additional step of opening access to he server for the localhost to
enable these two reponses is no longer needed. Unfortunately, the directory
response still makes a call to the server, so support for that feature will
still require the additional configuration. See README-security and the FAQ
for information about setting up a secure server
(http://www.opendap.org/faq/server_security.html).

All executables are now prefixed with 'dap_' to avoid situations where other
packages use the same names (as was the case with 'usage').

Updated for version 3.5.0

* Server 3.5 is an update for the current CGI-based server whose dispatch code
is written using Perl. The code is still Perl :-( but will have several
enhancements suggested/implemented by various people over the past few
months.

* This version of the OPeNDAP server is built and distributed separately from
the libdap library.

* The server's configuration file is now named 'dap-server.rc.' We're going
to keep the name 'nph-dods' so that existing links don't break. People
upgrading servers should take their dods.rc file and make sure any
customizations ae addedd to dap-server.rc.

* Only the nph-dods script and dap_server.rc files will be installed in the
cgi binary directory. The remainder of the Perl and the 'helper' programs are
now stored elsewhere. This makes it much harder for people to hack the
servers and also makes setting up several servers at one site simpler. This
design change was suggested by John Allison at UCAR, I think, and I don't
know why it has take me so long to release a version of the server that
employs it... Others may have also suggested this and I was just to thick to
pick up on it. ;-)

* The code (except for nph-dods and dap_server.rc) now installs in regular
directories as you'd expect with Unix/Linux. The Perl code installs in
/usr/local/share/dap and the C++/C binaries install in /usr/local/sbin by
default, although you can change this easily).

* The server no longer requires data providers to use the web daemon's
DocumentRoot as the root of the data. Instead the 'data root' is set from
within the dap_server.rc file. This will make setting up secure servers simpler
since it's no longer necessary to make two security configurations for the
data. The old design where data security is based on securing the server is
still the model used by this server, but at least the management of that has
been cut in half. This was suggested by Neil Killeen at CSIRO. Note that if
data_root is not set in the dap_server.rc file, the old behavior is used as a
default. Thus existing sites don't need to mess with this at all; those
configurations will continue to use DocumentRoot as the root of the data.

* The server now uses a smaller number of helper applications, which I've
called 'handlers' to process different types of files. Instead of having
three programs for netCDF, three for HDF, et c., there's now just one handler
for each format. (This was first implemented by Jake Hamby at JPL years ago
and also by Jose Garcia and Patrick West from HAO). These handlers now have
their own CVS/SVN modules and will be used by both this code and Server4.

Still to be done:

* The tools are helper programs that generate the info, ascii and HTML
responses for the server. These have been moved into the server's directory.
However, these programs still make a round-trip to the server to access data.
The next release will fix this and these programs will read directly from the
data sources using the handlers. This will not only speed up generating these
reponses but also simplify security configurations since an extra setup step
where local accesses are allowed for all will then be eliminated.

Changes in version 3.4

The server configuration file dods.ini is now called dods.rc. This name
change brings the file in line with the other configuration files used by
OPeNDAP software. Previously the configuration file was just used to match
'handler' programs to data source (usually files). However, with the 3.4
release we've migrated all the configuration information into this file
(except for the experimental statistics software). The dods.rc file has
comments which explain the various paramters.

We've reduced our dependence on some Perl modules by replacing them with a
compiled (C++) program called 'curl.' If you're upgrading a server, make sure
you get this or features like ASCII and HTML responses will not work.

We have had some issues in the past with serving data from files that are
compressed using UNIX compress or gzip. See the special section below about
serving these types of files for important configuration information!

$Id: NEWS 22716 2010-05-12 16:23:29Z jimg $