GeoTools 2.6.1 Released

The GeoTools 2.6.1 release is now available for download:

• geotools-2.6.1-bin.zip
• geotools-2.6.1-project.zip
• geotools-2.6.1-doc.zip

This release contains a host of improvements and bug fixes. In particular the JMapPane has received a lively round of testing and feedback, MySql is back among the supported data stores in its JDBC-NG implementation along with MS SQL Server and SpatiaLite.

The epsg-hsql module now creates its cached EPSG database much faster and with better concurrency control, and a new projection, the polyconic one, has been added to the referencing subsystem.

The rendering subsystem can now accept Function as a source for the Symbolizer geometry, meaning it's possible to perform a transformation (buffer, offset, point extraction) before the actual rendering chain starts (transformations are applied in the geometry native coordinate reference system).Also new is the ability to automatically displace point and polygon labels in search for a position that is not used by another label, using the same vendor parameter already available for lines.

A brand new JPEG2000 coverage reader that can leverage on kakadu has been added, more information can be found here.

Release Notes:

• 2.6.1 Release Notes

For more information please visit:

• http://geotools.org
• http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/2.6.x
• http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Upgrade+to+2.6

Enjoy, 
The GeoTools Community

Polyconic

A couple of things surprised me in a recent trip to Brazil.

Interestingly there was a lack of adoption of many common open source geospatial tools. Turns out that open source is competing in the market with "free as in beer" products. I imagine that will shape into quite the dust up in the years ahead.

The other surprise for me was that GeoServer could not really be used; turns out that the local coordinate reference system for the Brazilian datasets was in a projection not supported by GeoTools. I managed a little bit of research into the topic; collecting some data samples and so on.

Over the holidays Andrea managed to implement the missing "Polyconic Projection" and it is great to have visual confirmation of the result.



Thanks for this fix Andrea - it really will open up a new market for GeoTools.

FOSS4G GeoTools Tutorials

Catching up on post FOSS4G activities; one of the items has been presenters making their materials available under creative commons for the foss4g website to publish.

With that in mind I am pleased to make the GeoTools tutorials from FOSS4g 2009 available under a create commons license! If you would like the original open office documents (perhaps to translate!) give us a shout on geotools-devel email list and we can send them over.

To start out with here are the slides providing a bit of background and the order of the workbooks:

- GeoSpatialForJavaSlides

QUICKSTART

The initial "quickstart" is available in two flavours depending on the IDE you use:

- GeoToolsNetBeansQuickstart

- GeoToolsEclipseQuickstart

This workbook walks you through creating an application to display a shapefile.

When you go through this quickstart you have a choice of using Maven to manage all your jars or to just download GeoTools an unzip it. The process of downloading GeoTools and putting it to work is a little tricky in that you cannot use all the jars at once - so this quickstart provides helpful step by step instructions.

TUTORIALS

The remaining workbooks are as follows:

• FeatureWorkbook
• GeometryCRSWorkbook
• FilterWorkbook
• ImageWorkbook
• StyleWorkbook

I would really like to thank Michael Bedward who’s hard work and dedication has added greatly to the GeoTools community. Also thanks to Tyler for pulling together a common look for OSGeo content; and finally those attending the FOSS4G 2009 tutorial in person.

I notice that the tutorial evaluation page is still open for anyone who missed it during the conference.

GeoTools 2.6.0 released

We are pleased to announce the long awaited release of GeoTools 2.6.0.

New features and improvements since GeoTools 2.5.x

Much of the effort in developing GeoTools 2.6 has been focussed on quality and performance but there are also a number of new features including :

• The gt-process module now makes it possible to integrate external libraries such as Sextante into GeoTools applications. It also now provides vector to raster conversion.
• The new gt-swing module with a basic collection of GUI components, many of which can be seen in use in our Quickstart and example applications.
• A cleaner set of modules with a number of previously unmaintained and redundant modules being removed.

Getting this release

You can download the binary, source and javadoc distributions as zip files from SourceForge.

The source code can be downloaded using your favourite Subversion client from: http://svn.osgeo.org/geotools/tags/2.6.0

Those of you using Maven as your build tool can simply change the version for GeoTools artifacts to 2.6.0 in your pom.xml.

Finally, you can browse the javadocs for this release online.

Enjoy !

GeoTools 2.5.8 Released

It's been a big week for GeoTools releases, with both 2.6-RC1 and 2.5.8 hitting the streets.

GeoTools 2.5.8 has seen a number of changes including:

• Improvements Shapefile locking
• Various fixes to ImageMosaic stability
• Support for JDBC aggregate functions

To try out the latest release, head on over to the downloads page.

GeoTools 2.6 has finally reached release candidacy, with the resolution
of a few key issues, including:

• Solving a crash when reading ECW files
• Updated the WCS 1.1 EMP model
• Resolved a reader exception caused by FastBBox filters
• The long-awaited return of the Javadoc build

For more information look to the 2.6.x branch page of the GeoTools wiki.

Cold cat kills Java 5

I have just upgraded to Snow Leopard - a few little visual tweaks is nothing to write home about; sounds like most of the effort is focused making the different parts of the operating system 64 bit. The original Leopard came with Java 6 but it was not the default ... for command line applications and applets (does anyone use those?) Java 5 was in use. You could hunt down Java 6 on your hard drive and configure tomcat or eclipse to use it if you liked.

But the upgrade also removed my copy of Java 5! These days even Sun wants to charge extra for any kind of Java 5 support; this is an issue for many Java Enterprise Edition users who are not in a position to upgrade due to corporate policy, version of websphere used etc...

This was my first time building GeoTools on mac with Java 6 - and it did not work (running out of memory during the build). Changing between 32 and 64 bit Java just changed what module the build process failed in. Pointing to a problem with the build tool call Maven; upgrading to 2.2.1 and giving it a lot more memory seems to have done the trick - but I am not really convinced.

If you would like to switch between Java versions:

1. Use spotlight to find the Java Preferences
   
   
2. Shuffle which version of Java is used
   
   

Interestingly I could *see* the older versions of Java on my hard drive - turns out they were all symbolic links to the same Java 6. The path /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions contains a list of what is available.

Other than this only a few of my usual tools required upgrading:

• An update to Skitch (used to take the above screen snaps)


• Maven 2.2.1

GeoTools 2.5.7

I am pleased to announce the release of GeoTools 2.5.7, which is now available for download. While there are a number of new features included in this release, such as ArcSDE versioning and non-spatial table support and improvements to the performance and stability of filters and the next-generation JDBC datastores, there is more exciting news for this release. At least, it is for me.

This release marks LISAsoft's first official foray into the release processes of GeoTools. Assisted by veteran release managers Jody Garnett and Justin Deoliveira, and some very clear and well documented build processes, I only ran into a few troubles. For those of you that are familiar with the release process of these projects, you'll know where those troubles live; the cite testing for GeoServer. But patience prevailed and the release was put out late last week.