GeoTools Report 2008

Project Name

 * Contact name: Jody Garnett, LISAsoft

Key Accomplishments
community questions
 * We have graduated from the OSGeo incubation process. This is a major accomplishment given the maturity of the GeoTools library and the complexity of the questions raised over the course of our incubation.
 * We move moved key project resources (svn repository and maven artifact repository) to OSGeo hardware
 * GeoTools 2.5 is the first releases made under OSGeo copyright
 * GeoTools 2.5 represents the deployment of a new feature model - this is the end of a four year RnD effort with collaborators from around the globe
 * We are very pleased with the success of our change proposal process introduced in 2008 it has reduced the amount of time spent in IRC in planning activities
 * We have found the time to talk to other Java development communities (an area we listed as needing improvement in 2007). The OSGeo metaCRS and standards list has been instrumental in making these connections.
 * We have attracted several valued contributors active in both their own modules and on the user list
 * We are especially pleased with the ability of the user list and user guide to answer
 * The GeoAPI project (which we use as a source of stable interfaces) has renewed its mandate, as such we will continue to monitor our involvement

Areas for Improvement

 * The success of the change proposal process has reduced the usefulness weekly IRC meetings
 * The library is meeting the needs of our core contributors at the moment - while this offers a great motivation for QA activities it presents a source of friction with our traditional research driven development history
 * Several popular modules (such as oracle-spatial) do not currently have a module maintainer and are listed as unsupported
 * Our style interfaces are based around the SLD 1.0 specification; we would like to update these interfaces to match the Symbology Encoding 1.1 specification in order to offer several improvements such as buffers based on real world ground units
 * The user guide remains weak in the area of styling and rendering documentation
 * We are caring a large technical debt (mostly visible in the form of deprecated methods) that is the source of confusion on the user list
 * We need to define procedures around the use of distributed version control systems

Opportunities to Help
Our user community has been very vocal about the need to construct swing widgets around the geotools library. If this is an area that is of interest to you please volunteers. There are also several unsupported modules that are in need of a friend; if you find yourself with the time and ability to adopt a section of code we would love your support.

Outlook for 2009
GeoTools is starting 2009 with a renewed vigor - key contributors are emerging from the work that has gone into making GeoTools 2.5.0 such an amazing release.

There are several exciting modules that are expected to reach supported status this year. The imageio-ext-gdal module allows access to a host of GDAL supported raster formats. The jdbc-ng modules represent our second generation Database access implementation built around prepaired statements.

The community is looking at simplifications that can be made as the shape of GeoTools 3.0 is defined. Take part in this and other activities in what promisses to be an exciting year for the GeoTools project.