[gdal-dev] GSOC 2015 proposal - Integration of cpp GDAL utilities into GDAL core library

[Tim Keitt]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Newcomb, Doug <doug_newcomb at fws.gov> wrote:

> +1
>
> The utilities are used by a lot of folks who cannot have compilers loaded
> on their computers for security reasons.
>
> Doug
>
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Damian Dixon <damian.dixon at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> There are a lot of GIS specialists and geographers who are not
>> programmers that use the tools to convert or query gis data before using
>> within a commercial gis tool.
>>
>> I believe that there is merit in providing a higher level api.
>>
>> Just my two pennies worth... as a programmer... working for a GIS company
>>
>
This is an excellent proposal. The current utilities are giant passages of
uninterrupted code. This makes them hard to maintain, extend and reuse. The
"main" function in these utilities should be a short sequence of function
calls to smaller blocks of code, which in turn should each be a short
sequence of function calls into yet smaller code blocks. Building a nice
API boundary between the utilities and GDAL core would be a big step
forward. As someone that writes wrappers for GDAL, I would really like to
be able to use the code from those utilities via a well-defined API. I've
gone as far as copying the utility code into a separate file and the
re-writing the main function as a function call interface and then linked
against this code. It would be really nice to have the functionality of the
utility programs callable from one or a small number of C API functions.

THK

-- 
http://www.keittlab.org/
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