For many years, PrepIFS has been the tool which ECMWF and Member and Co-operating State scientists use to configure their model experiments with ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System (IFS). Recently, with the help of our consultant Paul Davis, who worked for four months with staff from the Research Department and the Development Section, a comprehensive review of the code was carried out and changes were implemented. An important goal was to make PrepIFS work with the latest long-term support version of Java. This work, together with an extensive code clean-up and refactoring, will greatly ease the migration to the systems to be installed in the new data centre in Bologna, and it will ensure that PrepIFS remains easy to maintain into the future.
The code has also been moved under git version control, and automatic tests have been set up to make sure no regressions are introduced with future developments. This should ensure that the stability of the application is maintained in future releases. PrepIFS releases are now versioned through the module system. The work was finished by the end of March and users now benefit from better performance, several minor bug fixes and new features which were implemented.