What are the differences between the Standard Interface, Internal Interface, and the CDF Java APIs?
The CDF library comes with two types of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for C and Fortran: Standard Interface and Internal Interface. The Standard Interface allows to perform specific, basic operations such as creating a CDF file, opening a CDF file, and reading and writing data. See chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the CDF Fortran Reference Manual or the CDF C Reference Manual for a complete list of the APIs that are available for the Standard Interface and Internal Interface and their detailed descriptions. There are two types of Standard Interfaces: Original and Extended. The Original Standard Interface was introduced in early 90’s and they only provide a very limited functionality within the CDF library. For example, it can only handle rVariables and can not handle zVariables and has no access to attribute’s entry corresponding to the zVariables (zEntries). Up until CDF 2.7.2, if you wanted to create or access zVariables and zEntries, you had to use the Internal Interface that is
