John Grange wrote:
I've just seen JDK 1.5 rear it's head again - I had thought I should say
something before, but I MUST now.
I would be *really* disappointed if geotools started incorporating JDK 1.5
features as I, along, probably, with many others, am unable to run JDK1.5 in my
J2EE container. We run Weblogic 7.0 here and have neither the time, nor the
budget to migrate to a JDK 1.5 compatible version and this would force us to
ignore any other improvements in geotools.
See our Developers Guide - Java 5 is not an issue until J2EE support is
around. We all know this, it is geotools "policy" :-)
I am just disappointed I cannot think of a way to strongly type the
difference between specification versions (or even what is standard and
what is stuff we made up).
Also, IMHO, the next few versions of Geotools may be better targetted at consolidation of the excellent toolkit developed so far. Documentation needs improving, interfaces and classes need naming so that one does not have many alternatives to choose from when importing a class (Try Geometry or Envelope - which does the uninitiated user use in any given case - I think that it should be the org.opengis only and everything else has a different name).
Uncomfortably that wont happen unless a body of geotools users gets
involved - the developers working on the project are usually there to
add features. To wit - the current user docs are very close to be
removed with out a editor or user to champion them. I have had several
attempts to organize/edit them to no avail. The best long term stratagy
would be to include GeoTools use in the developers guide (the only
document that gets regular attention). There has been discussion from a
few authors about including GeoTools in forthcoming books ... any
assistance in this regard would be great.
However not all is lost:
- I have been able to do some udig training courses, giving me a chance
to focus on geotools usability
- Recent discussion about factories and containers will lead to a
cleaner more consistent usage experience
- GeoServer team has started putting together a great set of documentation
- uDig is also putting together develoeper docs, that are available as a
eclipse plugin (so you can get geotools reference material as you program)
Geotools is a very powerful toolkit, but in many instances, it is not
straightforward to find out how to do what you want.
Generics and autoboxing are all very well, but will they make it *that* much
easier for developers to accomplish their goals?
Not at all. The feature we are interested in is called "Type Narrowing".
And we are only looking at this to make totally
explicit (aka compile errors) restrictions made by the specifications we
are tracking. Up until now GeoTools has not
tried to track more then one version of a specification.
Jody
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