[Java-collab] Re: [Geotools-devel] GeoTools moving forward

[Justin Deoliveira]

(I apologize if this gets posed twice, i was not signed up to this list 
with my new email address so it bounced).

Hi Landon,

I agree, this situation would be ideal. I actually thought a little bit 
about what this might look like a while back. More from the angle of how 
a unified Geotools / proj interface might look like:

I think Geotools and Proj represent two ends of the spectrum. On the one 
end proj has a very straight forward and simple api. However perhaps not 
rich or complex enough to model every single case you want. And on the 
other end of the spectrum is GeoTools/GeoAPI which is rich enough to 
model every case you want to, however is too complex to practically 
implement and serve as interfaces for interoperability among toolkits.

So in my mind the first step would be to find the middle ground. Come up 
with interfaces both "useful enough" and "simple enough".

2c,

-Justin

Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> GeoTools Developers,
> 
> I'd like to share some thoughts on the referencing module. I'm
> wondering if this new situation that has developed would be an
> opportunity to introduce a common interface that could be used for
> coordinate transformations. After all, from a client code
> persepective, the process can be very simple. The client code gives
> the interface a source crs, a destination crs, and 2 double values for
> the x any y coordinate being transformed, and the interface returns 2
> new double values representing the transformed coordinate.
> 
> We could then implement the interface using Martin's code in GeoTidy,
> but would also be able to plug-in other crs transformation code as
> needed.
> 
> For this interface to be the most flexible, I would suggest we stay
> away from high-level objects, and instead used basic data types and
> simple objects whenever possible. Since there are a lot of different
> ways you can identify a CRS we could pass this information to the
> interface as a String, and allow the interface implementation to
> define the crs identifier formats that are supported.
> 
> Maybe there is already an interface like this in GeoAPI?
> 
> I was thinking it might look like the following:
> 
> public abstract void setSourceCrs(String argSourceCrs);
> 
> public abstract void setDestinationCrs(String argDestinationCrs);
> 
> public abstract double[] transformCoordinate(double[] coordinate);
> 
> Using this approach would free Martin to pursue whatever modifications
> he wished, while allowing the the rest of the GeoTools programmers the
> freedom to provide their own implementation of the interface (I might
> be interested in a deegree implementation) and would also allow them
> to choose the implementation that best fits their needs.
> 
> I'd be willing to maintain a module with such an interface, and to
> work with Martin (if he was willing) to provide an implementation of
> this interface that was plumbed to his GeoTidy code.
> 
> The Sunburned Survyeor
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-- 
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.