Hello Adrian,
> My first sustained experience with using the library (2.1 release) has
> been a phenomenal disappointment, marred by frustration with the web
> site, with the docs, with the javadocs, and with the code. GIS and a
> code library are hard enough to understand without adding
> needless pain
> on top of it all. You all are *much* better coders than the claptrap
> state of affairs that exist currently. Through all your
> refactoring and
> redesign you have created a real mess.
>
> So now, while my user frustration is good and fresh, here's an
> unadulterated rant. I've got five other emails in various states of
> composition which are a lot more constructive and positive to
> defray the
> ranting, including hopefully some revamped tutorials. Still,
> so that you
> all can feel my pain:
Thanks so much for this. I have been through the same process, and from
the mailing list I think I can conclude that everybody has to go the
same, painful route.
I also agree with you about the purpose of these comments: constructive
criticism. Please take my remarks as such as well. I am glad geotools is
there. I feel sorry that it is not better than it is now, where it could
so easily be so much better.
My biggest frustration is with the development process itself. When I
started with geotools, I noticed that the snippets were not working. So
after I had found out the hard way how things are to be done, I posted
two snippets myself. Out came a newer version of geotools, I think we
went from 2.1.M3 to 2.1.M5, and my snippets no longer even compiled. So
then I knew why the existing snippets did not work. What am I expected
to do, adapt my snippets after every new version of geotools? The same
happened to a graticule module I was trying to donate to the project,
after the first newer version it no longer compiled and it took me a day
to get it working again.
My second biggest frustration is the design of the 'library'. I tried to
implement my own Filter, which is an interface. I tried again. And
again. Finally I had to give up. The reason is in the design of it all,
the Filter interface just is not what one would expect it to be. In
general it is not clear to me what parts of the *public* interface of
the geotools components can be considered *published* (ie stable and
supported). Given the design process, I have to doubt whether the
geotools developers themselves know.
And then there is the implementation. I tried to use the sld rendering
component (which is really great!) within one of my own (non-geotools)
components. It turns out there is simply no way of getting access to the
sld rendering engine. I found this out by looking at the LiteRenderer's
source code. What I saw there made me shiver: endless pages of code like
if (style instanceof LineStyle)
... do line styling ...
if (style instanceof TextSymbolizer)
... do text styling ...
etc, etc, etc
Why use Java if you don't do Object Oriented Programming? It is such a
mess I did not gather enough courage (yet?) to rewrite it.
Again, geotools is great, thanks very much for geotools. Good luck,
Arjan.
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