GeoTools 14.4 released

The GeoTools team is pleased to announce the release of  GeoTools 14.4:

• geotools-14.4-bin.zip

• geotools-14.4-doc.zip

• geotools-14.4-userguide.zip

• geotools-14.4-project.zip

• maven repository

This release was made by Andrea Aime (GeoSolutions) and Alessandro Parma (GeoSolutions) in conjunction with GeoServer 2.8.4.

GeoTools 14.4 is the latest stable release of the 14.x series and is recommended for all new projects.

New features available in this release:

• [GEOT-5375] - Add a group by visitor (backport 14.x)

For more details on the improvements and fixes, please refer to the release notes for GeoTools 14.4

About GeoTools 14

GeoTools 14 highlights:

• Z order control during map production (GeoSolutions)
• Extend Contrast Enhancement method handling in SLD and CSS (GeoSolutions)
• PostGIS Curve Support (GeoSolutions)
• MongoDB DataStore (Boundless)
• EJML replacement for vecmath
• JAI-Ext, the Open Source replacement for Oracle JAI (GeoSolutions)

For more information see the  14-M0, 14-M1, 14-beta, 14-RC1, 14.0, 14.1, 14.2 and 14.3 release notes.

GeoTools Header Policy Updated

GeoTools Developers Guide on source code conventions has been updated with a new policy on file headers (exciting I know).

GeoTools will now focus on filling in headers with the current year on initial file creation ... and that is it.

/*
 *    GeoTools - The Open Source Java GIS Toolkit
 *    http://geotools.org
 *
 *    (C) 2016, Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)
 *
 *    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 *    modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
 *    License as published by the Free Software Foundation;
 *    version 2.1 of the License.
 *
 *    This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 *    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 *    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
 *    Lesser General Public License for more details.
 */

Previously, we asked contributors to update the headers each time they modified a file, resulting in a date range at the top of each file. While not technically difficult, this was a constant chore for committers and caused friction and delays reviewing pull requests. We trust that the new policy will ease the pull request submission and review process.

We have approached the OSGeo Board and gotten approval to bounce this change off legal counsel. It is hoped that other OSGeo projects can benefit from being more relaxed.

Thanks to Justin for writing up the change proposal and steering this conversation on the mailing list.