Sunburned Surveyor wrote: > It doesn't seem very fair for me to make this criticism from the > outside, if I make no effort to fix the problems I believe exist. Nor > does it do me much good to carry the flag of collaboration if I'm not > making a serious effort to support the very vehicle set up by the > OSGeo to make that collaboration possible. > Sounds great; I am especially looking forward to your questions (and use them to improve the user guide). > I would like to become an actual contributor to GeoTools in an effort > to rectify this situation. I'm not up to becoming a Maven expert just > yet, and I don't even think I want to be a committer at this point. I > just want to try making some small contributions. This will allow me > to get an inside perspective on the GeoTools development process, will > help me to identify what works, and will help me to identify what > seems to be broken or a major obstacle to greater adoption of the > library. > The Developers Guide is the place to start; and we don't expect anyone to be a maven expert (that is what we have a community for). I hope you will find the instructions clear and straight forward; if not feed me your questions and we will help set you up. > I hope this will not be percieved as hostile or aggressive, but as a > sincere effort to make GeoTools more popular and accepted among FOSS > projects like OpenJUMP. > No worries. > Having said that, I must warn you that I am not necessarily a standard > zealot, nor am I passionate about extreme speed and conciseness at the > cost of all else. My main goals as a programmer are practicality, > simplicity, and understandable code. > Sounds fine; we have all kinds of developers here - it honestly helps to have a mix (so that the library can remain general purpose). > I'd like to start my (possible) journey as a GeoTools contributor with a > couple of questions: > Heh; I don't even have to wait ... > [1] Is there a list of GeoTools modules in need of some help? I'd rather not > start a new module, although I have about 20 things I could probably port to > GeoTools, and I don't want to get in over my head. I'd also prefer something > that was fairly loosely coupled, so I could use the work in OpenJUMP. > Each module is it's own little island; the modules in "unsupported" are works in progress; or projects that have been orphaned ... as such they do not have strict QA controls and are easier to get started with.
The difficulty here is that GeoTools follows a layered architecture; so if you are working on say "gt-mysql" you have dependencies on JTS and gt-api, gt-metadata, gt-referencing, gt-data, gt-jdbc ... so the "loosely coupled" request is hard to meet. Either you can work at a "low-level" (say on "geometry" and have very few dependencies) or a "high-level" on something like auto magic style generation (ie the "gt-brewer" module). So I can think of several recommendations of areas that would love some work in the gt-main.jar: - high priority, nobody working on it: EqualIntervalFunction and EqualIntervalFunctionTest processes a FeatureCollection and returns a "Classifier" (a series of ranges) that split the data up into groups - this is used to generate really pretty styles. - low priority easy introduction: Eclesia has found a series of excellent functions as part of the Symbology Encoding specification; for things like concatenating Strings, formatting Dates and so on .. all of these are nice small Functions that can be written up and are a good introduction to how the library is stitched together. > I checked this page: http://geotools.codehaus.org/How+to+Help but "tasks for > new developers" and "unassigned issues and tasks" sections of the page appear > to be broken. Is there another place to view these lists? Basically, I need a > module I can contribute to. (Here is a chance to get some help scratching > your itch!) > I have not seen that page in years; and should remove it. See you are already helping. > [2] Must I really sign up for CodeHaus to be a GeoTools contributor? :] > CodeHaus keeps our wiki; as part of a being a contributor we like to document what we are doing for others. Given the fact that I usually run around and slurp up interesting code examples from the user email list; or test cases ... no you do not. I would however recommend it, being kind to users is one of the goals I have for GeoTools being successful. > [3] It seems that the page that exports the Developer manual in PDF is > busted. It starts, but never moves past 0% complete: > http://geotools.codehaus.org/ Is there another place to get a PDF copy of the > developers manual? > It works for me, and took around 5 seconds - it could be you need to be signed into codehaus for export to be available - I will check the permissions. Meanwhile I am emailing you a copy offline... Jody ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
