GeoTools Report 2009

This has been a very productive year for the GeoTools project; we really changed gears this year to focus on stability and documentation. This is a new direction for the GeoTools project which will dilute or previous emphasis on standards research and has cost us some members of our development team.

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 Micheal
• Application Schema module ready for production - thanks Perth CSIRO team
• New Project Management Committee members - welcome Ben, Christian and Micheal
• Many new modules:
  • jdbc-ng 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.
  • swing module was revamped for use as the hear of the new visual introduction documentation
  • process module was picked up and improved with some great raster to vector functionality - thanks Micheal
  • JPEG2000 plugin - thanks Simone
• New features:
  • geometry transformations enabled for the renderer (allowing geometry to be preprocessed prior to drawing)
  • high quality icon rendering from SVG - thanks Jonathan
  • wfs 1.1 support - thanks Gabriel
• Successful FOSS4G Tutorial - thanks Micheal and Jody
• 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 - but mostly we are excited to work with some great new contributors. 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. Stephan has been bringing in all kinds of ideas from AtlasStyler and contributing great patches.

We also had a look with deegree team at the issue of 3D Geometry. Thanks to CSIRO for setting up this opportunity, and to the deegree team for taking some time to collaborate from their busy release schedule.