Hi all, I've been working on the new commons-geometry component for a while now and I wanted to share with everyone the current state of the project and what I'm picturing for the future, up to a 1.0 release.
Here is where we are now: 1. All of the original geometry code from commons-math has been moved to commons-geometry. 2. Code has been split into a number of distinct modules, per Java 9+ conventions. 3. The old Vector classes have been completely redesigned and refactored into separate Point and Vector classes to better reflect the underlying math. 4. All Point and Vector classes are now VALJOs. 5. Support for spherical and polar coordinates has been added. Here is what I'd like to still accomplish before a 1.0 release (in order of priority): 1. Add additional Vector methods (GEOMETRY-9) -- This includes methods like lerp, project, and reject among others. A pull request has been submitted for this and is in discussion. 2. Vector normalization optimizations (GEOMETRY-10) -- We can avoid a lot of computation by making some tweaks here. I've started on this but do not yet have a pull request. 3. Add matrix-based AffineTransform?D classes (GEOMETRY-14) -- We are sorely lacking an API to translate, rotate, and scale. 4. Encapsulate concept of tolerance (GEOMETRY-11) -- We currently use raw double tolerance values to help determine equality between floating point numbers. I think we should encapsulate this into a GeometryContext class to ensure that this is done consistently and to allow us to easily tweak the algorithm if needed. If anyone has any ideas for how to best maintain floating point accuracy here, that would be great. 5. API cleanup for Region, Hyperplane, and BSPTree (no JIRA issue yet) -- This is a big one and kind of ill-defined. One of the main gripes I and other people at my work have had with the old commons-math geometry code was that it was awkward to use. You had to jump through a bunch of hoops to do things like get the vertices of the union of two 2D shapes. I'd like to try to clean this up and streamline some of the common use cases. Comments and feedback on this would be great. 6. BSPTree optimizations (no JIRA issue yet) -- I have some ideas I'd like to try out to speed up the BSP tree code. My unofficial benchmark is to convert a model of the Utah teapot I have with ~1000 facets into a PolygonsSet and back. The current code cannot do this. It takes forever and then fails, I believe due to accumulated floating point errors. If we can get the code to be able to do this correctly and in a reasonable amount of time, then I'd feel good about making a release. Thoughts? Comments? I have a project at work coming up near the end of the year that I'd really love to use commons-geometry on, so that's what I'm aiming for in terms of a timeline. Thanks, Matt Juntunen
