Hello JTS list,
I'm writing to solicit the opinions of the folks on the JTS list on the
direction I should take with Spatial4j — a ~2 year old open-source project I
run with Ryan McKinley.
https://github.com/spatial4j/spatial4j
Background:
Spatial4j came about as a subset of a body of Java spatial code in support of
spatial information-retrieval for Apache Lucene and Solr. Spatial4j is the
subset that deals solely with defining shapes, computing distances, shape
intersection, and parsing and writing shape strings. To my knowledge, it is
only used by Lucene's new spatial module. Spatial4j is an independent part of
Lucene spatial for two reasons: Most importantly, it uses (albeit optionally)
the 3rd party JTS library which is LGPL licensed. The Apache Software
Foundations forbids a dependency, even an optional one, on LGPL licensed
software. The second reason is that Spatial4j should be independently useful on
its own. I don't know of the geodetic shape intersection algorithms it has
existing in any other open-source software. Perhaps I didn't look hard enough
but that is to the best of my knowledge.
Some specific features of note to the list here:
* A circle implementation, both in euclidean 2D mode and geodetic
surface-of-sphere mode
* computs intersection cases (disjoint, contains, within, intersects) between
the shapes it has and points and rectangles (either euclidean 2D or geodetic)
* Rewrites JTS geometries of lat & lon coordinates to support dateline
crossing. No pole wrap support yet.
There are extensive randomized tests, by the way.
So there's useful code here for sure, but it's only used by Lucene's Spatial
module (which I work on a great deal). With JTS about to be re-licesned in a
way compatible with ASF projects, it is no longer required that Spatial4j's
code exist outside of Lucene spatial.
I'm thinking of taking one of two paths:
(A) Merge it into Apache Lucene's spatial module. I'm a committer there.
Spatial4j as an independent project would be effectively dead but the code
would live on co-located where it is used. It would always be in sync with
Lucene (no separate releases).
(B) Join LocationTech. This approach will only be deemed successful, as far
as I'm concerned, if "eventually" people start using it.
What do you guys think of Spatial4j and what I should do with it?
~ David Smiley
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