Hello List,

After the pull request of Wayne Beaton I read the proposal and like to
discuss or suggest some points I had in mind:

Scope

* I guess the scope is to bring data from web mapping services, local
as well as remote vector and raster data sources to a rich client
applications, where the user can create, modify or delete spatial
objects or their attributes AND Analyze/Query different sources with
the same with via common interface

* gives bus business applications an easy to use extension to
   * display their data on a map to give users an other point of view
on their data sets
   * analyze data sets from a spatial perspective
   * create reports with spatial contents

and whatis uDig NOT?
- A GIS Application for the web to integrate into backend infrastructure.

For the description I guess it would be helpful if we mention EMF for
a model driven development projects. And probably this is also a kind
of expectation to come closer to the top-level Eclipse projects like
EMF/RCP, which means
- review of the current code
- with their knowledge a smoother integration into existing projects
- a better marketing over all Eclipse projects AND in the Eclipse
universe (User perspective instead Developers point of view)

I guess a great benefit for the Eclipse Community would be the
possibility for the Java-World to have an easy access to a wide range
of spatial datasets through the connectors provided by geotools, gdal,
jgrass and others.

I personally would prefer a common lightweight API to add spatial
content (via AdaptorFactories) to a map that acts like a Facade for
business apps which hides the complexity for spatial access. For
example you have several objects in your "host" application that have
spatial attributes and the user would like to see these on map (per
selection or whatever) the implementor should write AdapterFactories
to convert this IWhatever Objects to an lets say IMapObject .. and so
on


I know the background about "It is our intension to transition as
quickly as possible and promptly issue a release." but I don't know
whether its a good idea to stay where we are. From my point of view
the release cycles of other eclipse project are to long for a
community driven not really sponsored project like ours. From the
other side we're very close to the users in the geospatial OS
Community and would like to keep them happy abput short term response
and issue fixing. Nevertheless, probably we should try to mix this
"half-a year release" and kind of adhoc-release a bit and should turn
into a better planed release management. It doesn't exclude patch
releases for the community ;) The question is, do we have time to
- upgrade for Eclipse release train to a new Eclipse version and what
about long-term support and support for already released versions
- test the application itself and the integration into the current or
older eclipse release(s)

Technical I've JAI  /Image-IO on my list because of lack of knowledge
how to handle the "redistribution" license. IMHO we already
redistribute it with JRE but I'm not sure, whether we are right. The
other discussed option is bundling theses dependencies into bundles
and fragments with native support. We should clarify this before
moving on (thats the reason why I closed the pull request a few weeks
ago).

What do you think about a skype/google hangout to discuss the points
from the proposal. What kind of expectations, issues do you have.

I'm looking forward and interested in your opinions.

Cheers, Frank
_______________________________________________
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
http://udig.refractions.net
http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel

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