GeoTools

Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
Contact name: Jody Garnett

Key Accomplishments

• An amazing amount of software at FOSS4G was built around the GeoTools library; we were very happy with the community presence at this event
• We had a 3 day long code sprint after FOSS4G in which we switched over to Java 5 and the GeoAPI feature model. This is the end of a three years of development, months of careful planning and review prior to the event allowed this change to go smoothly.
• Adrian Custer performed an exhaustive check into what is needed to assign copyright to the OSGeo Foundation, this has allowed us to resume discussions with the OSGeo board.
• Jody Garnett has started putting together a user guide for the library
• Our policy change allowing new developers to use the code repository to work on "unsupported" modules has been a great success. Unsupported modules are not bundled with the main GeoTools library and represent work that has not yet met our quality assurance guidelines. This change lowers the bar to participation allowing the GeoTools project to incubate new talent and ideas.

Areas for Improvement

• We made no progress on incubation during the year as we waited for a way forward; this seems to be resolved for 2008
• We have no time to talk to other Java developer communities, there is a lot of code duplication in this space (and several forks of the GeoTools code)
• The burden of keeping a build box going for such an active community is punishing
• SVN access has had bouts of downtime; we are clearing up the repository (of large test data) and considering moving to a newer version of SVN on OSGeo hardware. Developers have started playing with distributed version control.
• There are more answers going by on the user list than are being captured in the user guide; additional help jotting down code examples would be welcome

Opportunities to Help

Please try out the User Guide and give us feedback; we want to make sure the you can start hacking

Outlook for 2008

GeoTools is looking forward to making 2008 the best year yet. There is a lot of exciting development now underway - from embracing Java 5, to rolling our WFS 1.1 support. 2008 will see the long expected return of swing widgets to the GeoTools library.

GeoTools 2.4.0 is available now and marks the last Java 1.4 release of the library.