[Gdal-dev] GDALDataset as a Base Class

[Ari Jolma]

Frank Warmerdam kirjoitti:
> for GDAL in different languages well.  With the swig languages, my hope
> was that a objects would appear similarly in all languages so it would be
> easier to "document once", or even to relate things back to the core 
> C++ API.

There's surely a benefit in having a similar look and feel for all 
languages for using GDAL.
But as has been discussed on the geowanking list, and before on this 
list, I think, each
language is a bit of its own island. Also, with high-level languages the 
approach for
designing an API is much more user-oriented, while for, say, C++ it is 
more developer-
oriented.

Currently I'm a bit stalled because of other things, with my design of 
the new
Geo::GDAL module[1]  for Perl, but in it I try to look the issue from 
the point of view
of a script-writing user. For example I recreated the Geometry class 
hierarchy, which
does not exist in the Swig bindings to OGR. It all feels a bit silly: 
C++ toC to C++ in
Swig to Perl to Perl, but there are reasons.

Ari

[1] http://map.hut.fi/gdal-perl/Geo-GDAL.html

-- 
Prof. Ari Jolma
Kartografia ja Geoinformatiikka / Cartography and Geoinformatics
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://www.tkk.fi/~jolma