The Geotoolkit web site is available at
http://www.geotoolkit.org/
which is automatically generated from the code itself.
Geotoolkit is free software. Daily builds of the project as binaries
and source code bundles are available from the project web site. The
code is licensed to anyone for any use except that re-distribution
comes with some minor responsibilities designed to ensure the same
freedoms for the recipients. The code is currently licensed to all
users under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version
2. The code copyright is assigned to the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation (OSGeo). The source code is available to online at
http://hg.geotoolkit.org/
and can be obtained using the mercurial distributed version control
system with the call:
hg clone http://hg.geotoolkit.org/geotoolkit/which will provide users with a fully independent copy of the repository including the full history of the project itself and able to generate locally a working copy of any revision.
Geotoolkit is based on standards shared broadly by the geospatial community. Geotoolkit leverages the GeoAPI project which defines Java language interfaces for the standards published jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The core Geotoolkit library currently implements the following standards:
ISO 19103 Geographic Information --- Conceptual schema language
ISO 19115 Geographic Information --- Metadata
ISO 19111 Geographic Information --- Spatial referencing by
coordinates
while extensions implement:
ISO 19108 Geographic Information --- Temporal schema
OGC 05-078r4 OpenGIS Styled Layer Descriptor Profile of WMS
--- sld
OGC 05-077r4 OpenGIS Symbology Encoding Implementation
Specification --- se
and there are plans to implement more of these standards and their
profiles.
Geotoolkit aims to be clean and well designed. The library should build and deploy a full version of the code every day, including the maven jars and artifacts, the project web site, and the API javadocs. The code should open in the major Integrated Development Environments without errors or warnings (except where such warnings are wrong). All public code should be correctly documented, must follow the design of the Java language, and should be designed properly for method and field access, class inheritance, and code reuse.
Geotoolkit is built on the strengths of the Java language. The library follows the architectural design of the core Java library so as to provide the Java programmer with a familiar programing environment. The library exploits recent improvements to the language syntax for improved code quality. The library aims to run on the recent, high performance virtual machines developed by the major providers of Java implementations for maximum performace.
Geotoolkit uses the Mercurial distributed version control system. These systems such as Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial have recently swept the free software world due to a fundamental technical superiority over previous generation systems. Among the advantages of these new systems, they allow every developer to be the master of their own destiny, unfettered to advance in any direction they see fit and able collaborate with anyone in any way they choose. Mercurial is one of these systems, recently chosen by Sun for its work on Java, by the Python community for hosting the Python code, by the Mozilla foundation for hosting the Firefox project, and by several other major projects.
Project goals will be targeted to making the library as good as it can be rather than meeting any technical or marketing need of any third part project. The library will aim to provide regular releases. The project will develop, as the user community grows, a formal process by which contributions can be integrated to the central repository.
The governance model for Geotoolkit has not yet been finalized but it will aim to separate out the community management aspects of governance from the technical decisions.
Geotoolkit hopes to become a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It has formally asked to be accepted for incubation with the foundation which is the usual preparatory step for projects wishing to be accepted by the foundation.
Several projects already use the Geotoolkit library. The Constellation web server (http://www.constellation-sdi.org/) provides high- performance web services conformant with the CSW, SOS, WMS and WCS specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium based on Geotoolkit. The MDWeb project (http://www.mdweb-project.org/) provides both a server for metadata conformant with CSW-T and a web client based on the capabilities of Geotoolkit. The MapFaces project (http://www.mapfaces.org/ ) provides a framework for building web clients based on the geospatial infrastrcture and local rendering capabilities provided by Geotoolkit. The desktop client Puzzle GIS (http://puzzle-gis.codehaus.org/ ) uses Geotoolkit as its base library. We also know of one comercial application already being built using Geotoolkit.
Geotoolkit is a fork of the GeoTools library. Geotoolkit retains the long term goal but differs in its work approach: keeping the fundamental requirement of user freedom but restoring an emphasis on code quality, following closely the improvement of the Java language itself, leveraging new tools for decentralized collaboration, affirming the independence of the project from any specific user community, and restructuring the governance model.
Anyone interested by the Geotoolkit library, by our goal of building a great Java language geospatial library, and by our vision for a distributed, collaborative project should look at the Geotoolkit web site, browse the javadocs API documentation, clone the source code repository to build and tinker with it, try out the commandline tools, and see if the project suits their needs. Projects which are based on GeoTools today can be ported to Geotoolkit relatively easily using a migration tool in Geotoolkit, other geospatial projects will have to evaluate how to transition towards the ISO/OGC spatial data schema and the GeoAPI interfaces.
Vincent Heurteaux
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