Annual Report 2012

Key Accomplishments

• The project has switched from subversion to git and is now hosted at GitHub
• GeoTools 8.0 was released
  
  • First major release after a 1.5 year drought
  • Amazing release with Java 6, join support, temporal filters, detailed function descriptions
• A total of 10 GeoTools releases made over the course of the year
• The project has switched to a predictable time-boxed release model featuring: six month release cycle and stable release issued each month.
  
  • Extensive build infrastructure improvements with automated release scripts to help us meet this aggressive goal
• Extensive FeatureCollection cleanup and Quality Assurance run slated to land for the next major release

Areas for Improvement 

• Attract participation from downstream projects
• Coordinate with downstream projects around release testing
• Contribution License questions have provided some confusion this year

Opportunities to Help

• Volunteers needed to review pull-requests
• The transition to GitHub has certainty paid off, join the team and help us keep up!

Outlook for 2013

• Enjoying active success, and your participation

GeoTools 9.1 Released

The GeoTools community is pleased to announce the availability of GeoTools 9.1 for download from sourceforge:

• geotools-9.1-bin.zip
• geotools-9.1-doc.zip
• geotools-9.1-userguide.zip
• geotools-9.1-project.zip

Please see the release notes from the issue tracker for more details. This release is also deployed to our maven repository.

About GeoTools 9.1

This is our first dot release on the 9.1 series and is focused on bug fixes and stability. This release is made in conjunction with GeoServer 2.3.1. 

• Headline improvement is support for SQL Server native geometry serialisation. The fix was supplied by Anders Bakkevold and is expected to have a huge impact on performance. This work was sponsored by Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management and performed by Bouvet.
• SQL Server also got a fix to make native paging optional.
• Thanks to Dieter DePaepe for fixing GEOT-2791, addressing a long standing issue working with sparse shapefiles.
• Thanks to Frank Warmerdam for submitting a fix to distance calculations used when testing map projects. Frank was also kind enough to write a blog post covering his experience fixing GeoTools.
• Improvements to Arc parsing in GML were provided by Jira Novak.
• Shane StClair has added UUID mappings to PostGIS.
• Finally thanks to Simone who has addressed an annoying colour space issue on recent windows installations.

Thanks to all our volunteers on GitHub and the dedicated community members reviewing pull requests. A reminder to include a test-case with any proposed fix so we can smoothly review your work.

About the 9.x Series

Here is a summary of the new features for the GeoTools 9.x series:

• Native geometry serialisation has been added for SQL Server.
• Feature Collection Clean up: removed methods that were only applicable for in memory feature collections, combined with a general quality assurance review.
• Vector Grid module is now included as an extension.
• The gt-complex module provides general programming support for complex features.
• Library supports the use of Java 7 try-with-resource syntax.
• PostGIS, Oracle and Property files now provide Partial 3D data support backed by the introduction of ReferenceEnvelope3D.
• WMS 1.3.0 client support now enabled by default.
• OGC models and XML support for WCS 2.0 and OWS 2.0.

Dependencies:

• ImageIO-Ext 1.1.6 and JTS 1.13 release

For more information on GeoTools 9.x series

• GeoTools 9.0 Released ( Release Notes )
• GeoTools 9.0-RC1 Released ( Release Notes )
• GeoTools 9.0-beta1 Released ( Release Notes )
• GeoTools 9.0-M0 Released ( Release Notes )

Getting Started with GeoTools

GeoTools is an Open Source Geospatial Foundation project helping Java developers work with geospatial data. For a complete list of features please see the project overview included in our documentation.

If you would like to get started with GeoTools a Quickstart is available (covering Eclipse, NetBeans and command line Maven use). Additional tutorials and build instructions are included in the user guide.

GeoTools 9.x is the current stable series with a release scheduled each month. This level of service is part of our six month timed release cycle. We are always interested in volunteers - if you are in position to assist please stop by geotools-devel and lend a hand.

If you are upgrading from a previous version of GeoTools please review the upgrade instructions, as there has been some API changes around the use of FeatureCollection and ReferencedEnvelope.

Thanks for using GeoTools!