Hello, I don't have nearly enough information to do an honest assessment of your project and such a design program is a huge amount of work so you will have to take that on yourself.
The good news is that you are on the right path---there is a mix of technology which you could assemble to solve your needs. The bad news is that you are a year or two too early so this work is currently harder than it will eventually be. The design concerns will then revolve around the timeframe of your work. If your project is a decade long effort, then I'd encourage you to get into the heart of GeoAPI/Geotools/uDig. If you need a quick and dirty for the next six months, these projects will require a bunch of work and the *JUMP* projects (OpenJUMP...) may be easier to get up to speed with. For user interfaces, you have quite a few choices uDig, *JUMP*, or thuban (in python) as well as many others. For the back end, the PostGIS database is the place to work if you have vector data of any significant size. Interface to C/C++ is relatively easy but I have *no* idea how to link to VB. For .Net, the spring will be critical since Java will become free software and that will affect the IKVM project. I suspect one could program in .Net and have the whole Geotools stack running on an IKVM instance---a massive memory hog but one could get that to work. There was an effort to port Geotools to C# but I can't imagine that effort could last given the scale of the work involved. The canonical source for projects you can evaluate for your use is the freegis.org web site. There are projects in many languages and in various states of development. For example, I just saw that Thuban had a new release An aside on licensing, I suspect the 'free software' issue will prove more important than the 'open source' for the success of your project. While, for you, reading the source will be important to evaluate algorithms and understand code, for your users the freedom to re-mix will be critical. In that context, having code under LGPL may be important; the GPL is lovely but does prevent companies from mixing the old business style 'we sell added-value software' with the new style 'we support your particular uses of this free software.' You get the idea. Your needs will be met, eventually, by the GeoAPI interfaces, the Geotools library implementing those interfaces, and the uDig user application. GeoAPI (the packages in the opengis.org namespace) will eventually become the only thing that users need to learn: the interfaces define geospatial features, how to access their content, and how to manipulate them. Geotools is still a mix of quick-and-dirty functionality and polished design. uDig is a great foundation for user interfaces which allows easy user selection of objects and then for developers to hookup, relatively simply, a small operation to act on that selection. uDig aims to provide all of the 'common GIS functionality' you describe buffers, merges, joins... So GeoAPI/Geotools will be like arc objects eventually, but for now has a bigger scope and is focused on implementing the ISO geospatial model so is taking its time to develop a comprehensive solution. The next year of work on GeoAPI/Geotools/uDig may get us to the point where we have all the pieces you need available through elegant API. The GeoAPI interfaces to geometric elements are currently being implemented in Geotools. uDig is currently seriously evaluating user workflows for spatial operations. (The operations themselves are well understood and basically implemented, we are currently struggling to see what the best way will be for users to ask for the operations.) best of luck, --adrian On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 18:15 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi, Adrian. I saw a posting by you concerning which open source > product/technology was useful for what purposes. I would like to tell > you about what I am attempting to do in the hopes you can help me > decide which road to take. > > I am trying to develop a standalone geospatial application for Windows > that has the capacity to allow users to select point, lines, and > polygon features on a map. This selection and its numeric attributes > will be sent as an array(s) to already-existing VB/C/C++ functions > that will compute various calculations and return them to the user > either as a thematic map or tabular file. > > One of the things I want to be able to do is spatial analysis > on-the-fly, namely, common GIS operations such as intersect, > attribute/spatial joins, buffering, and perhaps others such as > raster-to-feature conversions, etc. I am becoming familiar with the > multiplicity of open source GIS technologies, but I am not sure if it > is developed enough to provide an API or SDK to programatically carry > out such operations. Of course, ESRI already has all this > functionality through ArcObjects and its .NET framework, but I want to > take the open source route. :-) > > Your thoughts and comments will be immensely helpful. > > Regards, > Juan Declet > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Geotools-gt2-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users
