Hey all, I've been having some offline discussions with Patrick Webb (Simone and Alessio have been included) from the University of Alaska. He's interested in data visualization of weather data and has focused in on wind barbs. He's also interested in folding his code into Geotools when he's done. This would be at the master's degree level of effort.
Problem: Geotools' renderer is based on SLD, SLD does not allow anything which is not specifically defined, and SLD does not define a means of portraying vector data, aka wind barbs. Current hacks generate a large number of icons (for each wind-speed/direction combo) and define one rule per icon. Patrick is interested in solving this problem so the hack is not necessary. The discussion thus far has centered on the approach to use, and Patrick has solicited feedback from me (as a GT-associated-person) as to what is "most useful". It thus becomes time to connect Patrick with the developers list, lest my opinion be mistakenly construed as consensus. :) The choices discussed focus on these two alternatives: 1] Refactor the rendering framework to accept some sort of pluggable rendering component. Write a wind-barbing component too. If we're doing this, the framework might as well conform to 19117. 2] Extend SLD (& our renderer) to define a WindBarbSymbolizer & parameters. This would need to be a legal tag for point features and coverages. #2 grates on my nerves because too many "extensions" is going to produce nasty code. #1 is more work, but provides a very nice framework into which new functionality may be added (e.g., it allows everything not specifically forbidden). Can you guess which one I've been talking up? :) My concern regarding #2 (aside from the nasty code that such grafting generally produces) is "tampering" with SLD. Are people going to want a "normal" SLD to live side by side with the "extended" SLD? Could we just replace the normal SLD parser with our extended version, or does this cause heartburn? If we need _two_ SLD parsers, how do we select the one to use? Please "reply to all" with comments, as I do not know if Patrick is on the list yet. (Patrick, it'd be good to join the mailing list if you haven't already. http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Mailing+Lists) Bryce _______________________________________________ Geotools-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel
