GeoTools Report 2009

GeoTools Report 2009
This has been a very productive year for the GeoTools project during which we really changed gears to focus on stability and documentation. This is a new direction compared to our previous emphasis on standards research. It has been accompanied by the departure of some long-standing members of our development team and the arrival of new members.

We promised productivity let us see how well the GeoTools team has delivered:
 * New website http://geotools.org/
 * Audit and cleanup of existing modules - thanks Andrea and OpenGeo
 * Strong Documentation for new Developers. An amazing amount of work building up friendly visual intro material - thanks Michael
 * Application Schema module ready for production - thanks Perth CSIRO team
 * New Project Management Committee members - welcome Ben, Christian and Michael
 * Many new modules:
 * the jdbc-ng (next generation) community module went from inception through our community process into production this year. Thanks to Justin and OpenGeo for this complete rewrite of our database access facilities.
 * the swing module was reborn to support our new visual tutorial material
 * the process module was picked up and improved with some great raster to vector functionality - thanks Michael
 * the JPEG2000 plugin was added - thanks Simone
 * New features:
 * the renderer now supports geometry transformations (such as buffering and extrusion) prior to drawing
 * high quality icon rendering from SVG - thanks Jonathan
 * wfs 1.1 support - thanks Gabriel
 * Successful tutorial at FOSS4G 2009 - thanks Jody and Michael
 * GeoTools 2.5 series issued six stable releases this year.
 * GeoTools 2.6 took over the reins as the stable release at year end

We have a lot of great ideas for the new year and we are excited to be working with some enthusiastic and creative new contributors such as Jonathan, who is pushing interesting rendering concepts into the mix such as "unit of measure" distances (so you can finally buffer 5km around a data set), and Stephan has been introducing all kinds of useful ideas from AtlasStyler as well as contributing great patches.

Finally, we also started to investigate the issue of 3D Geometry together with folks from the deegree team. Thanks to CSIRO for setting up this opportunity, and to the deegree team for taking out from their busy release schedule to collaborate with us.