Why a Platform¶
The Java GIS community is already host to several open-source toolkits of great capability. These toolkits provide a great number of services, and allow you the software developer to communicate with a wide varity of spatial information.
The UDIG framework goes the extra mile, providing a well structured application for you to extend. As a software developer you can focus on your tasks needed for your problem. The finding, connecting and display of spatial information can be someone else’s problem.
Relationship with Libraries and Toolkits¶
You will find that uDig is set up as a platform allowing you to work “out of the box” with:
- GeoTools interfaces and implementation
- OpenGIS interfaces for commercial standards (OGC) and international standards (ISO)
- GeoTools implementations
- JTS Toplogy Suite: provides the implementation of Geometry (ie the “Shapes”) you see on the screen
This is by no means a closed set; community plug-ins have experimented with:
- R for stats analysis
- C libraries like GDAL and OGR
- C++ libraries like OSSIM
If you hear of a good toolkit or library please ask on the email list; we would be happy to help you hook it up.