Welcome to ERDDAP Discussions!

[BobSimons]

Let's use Discussions as a place to post and discuss feature requests and other changes to ERDDAP. If a request is approved by the developers and assigned to a developer to work on soon, we'll move it to Issues.

In general, we prefer features or changes that:

• Are clearly useful. For example, features that make something new actually possible are very useful. Features that are a marginal improvement over an existing feature are less useful (but sometimes still worth it).
• Are useful to many/most/all ERDDAP users or administrators.
• Are easy to implement, Features that are hard to implement are fine, but note that a developer can implement numerous easy-to-implement features for every hard-to-implement feature.
• Don't add a lot of complexity to the code. Sometimes added complexity is worth it, but it is generally to be avoided.
• Don't functionally change the existing user interface. It is fine to add entirely new features or add small additional options to existing features, but it is bad to change the way existing features work. Users don't like changes to how they have been doing things. We want all requests that users have been making to continue to work. For example, if you want to significantly change the "Make A Graph" web pages, fine, but it would be better to create "Make A Graph v2" web pages that are an alternative to "Make A Graph" web pages.

For each feature/change request, we try to estimate the Return On Effort (ROE), which is basically all of the criteria listed above, but combined into one metric. Basically, we want to get more bang (useful features or changes) for the buck (developer effort). We pick the projects with the highest ROE to actually work on.

Please remember that the developers already have tons of possible projects to work on. That's why we prioritize the projects based on ROE (the criteria above). We generally only have time to work on "great" feature/change requests. Unfortunately, merely "good" requests may languish here for a long time. We're sorry. We're working as fast as we can.

If you are a Java programmer and want to work on one of these projects or help in general, please let us know.

Please vote for requests that you really like by giving the request a +1 (see the button below each discussion item). That is a way for us to judge how many people really want a feature/change. Please don't game the voting system by recruiting all your friends to vote for the request you like. Voting works if it is organic.

The developers will try to respond reasonably quickly to new requests and other comments here, but remember that they are simultaneously working on their current programming projects. It can be difficult and inefficient to jump back and forth frequently between a discussion here and the programming project(s) they are working on.

ERDDAP uses Agile development methods. So, in general, we pick the projects we're going to work on soon near the start of a development cycle (roughly every 3 months).

Thanks for contributing feature and change requests! Most of the changes to ERDDAP over the years have come from user and administrator requests.