Hi Justin, > Sadly yes I feel the statement is quite accurate. GeoTools is just not > designed for ease of use, it is designed to be powerful. Not to say that > some parts of the library aren't easy to use, but as a whole GeoTools is > farily unapproachable to newcomers imo.
That was my impression when I started learning GeoTools. I think if I'd been left with just the code and the javadocs I would have given up quite quickly. Fortunately, the murkiness (to me) of the API was more than offset by the friendly helpfulness of the folk on this list, but I still find learning new parts of the library can be quite intimidating. Milo's tweet made me wonder about the danger of "getting used" to the existing API: once you know your way around a bit, have some code snippets to recycle etc., you can easily forget about how confusing it seemed at first. I really like the attitude of "getting things working" which drives GeoTools development. It's unrealistic to expect that a sparsely resourced project will always be able to do the very large amount of extra work involved in going from "working" to "simple, elegant and well documented". But there are a couple of general things that worry me: 1. A lot of the knowledge of how to use GeoTools is transmitted by word of mouth rather than by the docs and examples. I think we're addressing that but so much to do ! 2. I don't think we get enough feedback of the sort in the tweet about the library's general usability, openness, style etc. New users just want to be led to get things working too and, perhaps, are too polite about the bits that they find cumbersome or unnecessary. Michael ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Geotools-gt2-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users
