GeoTools 9.0 released

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 9.0 for download from sourceforge:

• geotools-9.0-bin.zip
• geotools-9.0-doc.zip
• geotools-9.0-userguide.zip
• geotools-9.0-project.zip

This release is also deployed to our OSGeo Maven Repository.

This is the first stable release of the 9.x series made in conjunction with the GeoServer 2.3.0 release. This release represents the successful transition of the project to a six month timed release cycle.


This release contains mostly bug fixes since 9.0-RC1. Please see the change log for more details.
Here is a summary of the major news in the 9.x series:

• Feature Collection Clean up: we have retired several methods from FeatureCollection that were only applicable for in memory feature collections. A Quality Assurance review was performed on all FeatureCollection implementations resulting in a great improvement on consistency. Thanks to Jody Garnett and Andrea Aime for this work.
• The Vector Grid module has graduated from the "unsupported" staging area and is now included as an extension. Thanks to Micheal Bedward for championing this work.
• General support for complex features has been factored out into the gt-complex module for reuse.
• FeatureCollection, FeatureIteartor and FeatureReader are Java 7 ready with support for try-with-resource syntax.
• Partial 3D data support  has been added with direct support for PostGIS, Oracle, and Property DataStore. Thanks to Andrea Aime for the initial implementation, with a follow-up funded by NTLIS for Oracle support.
• Thanks to Niels Charlier for putting together ReferenceEnvelope3D allowing us to query three-dimensional datasets.
• WMS client support has greatly improved with WMS 1.3.0 now enabled by default during version negotiation. Thanks to LISAsoft and the OGC for supporting this work.
• New OGC models have been added for WCS 2.0 and OWS 2.0 along with XML support.
• Updated to use the latest ImageIO-Ext 1.1.6 and JTS 1.13 releases

The GeoTools 9.0 series contains API changes. Developers are encouraged to review the upgrade instructions prior to use.

If you missed the previous milestones, betas and RCs you can have a look at the complete set of improvements provided by the 9.0 series here:

• GeoTools 9.0 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-RC1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-beta1 Release Notes
• GeoTools 9.0-M0 Release Notes

Thanks for using GeoTools!

New OSGeo Contributor License

The GeoTools PSC is pleased to announce a new contribution license for the project. The contribution license is signed by authors in order to license their work to the OSGeo Foundation for distribution by the GeoTools project.

There are actually two licenses (one for individuals and one for corporate contributors) which are available in our developers guide or directly from the OSGeo Foundation licenses page:

• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement 
• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement

This license arrangement is much easier to understand, and is based directly on the Apache Contributor License. This last point is important as it is much easier for your legal department to research and sign off on.

These licenses were approved at a recent board meeting and are the result of our request for change procedure (see Replace Contribution Agreement RFC).