This talk is about cold hard truths, the kind of things you do not
expect to hear except muttered at the back of the room. This
presentation will cover the difficult, the dirty, where open source
costs you blood sweat and tears.

Indeed, this talk is about where GeoTools is improving to serve you
better. Ever wanted to know where useful docs can be found? How about
the results of an intellectual property check? No me either – but you
will need it so your boss will let you work with us.

What is new and wonderful, and how can you take advantage of it?
GeoTools is switching to GeoAPI interfaces with their nice rubber stamp
of OGC stability. The Filter 1.1 specification is out and we have
chalked up a slick set of interfaces to match. The ability to use Filter
expressions with more then just Features opens up a lot of doors, and
simplifies a lot of the code base./

The biggest news the incorporation of two long running research and
development branches: fast and scalable raster support making great use
of Java Advanced Imaging; and new feature classes opening up a can of
GML whoop ass within the safety of your Object Oriented IDE.

But wait there is more! New geometry interfaces (so you can finally have
a ball – well at least a curve), schema assisted parsers wait in the
wings (ever want to parse GML on the fly and into objects at the same
time?), and more rendering technologies are set to pounce. ISO standards
with a baffling array of numbers (TC211, 19109, 19115, 19119) are
reduced to interfaces before your eyes. Now if only an OGC catalog
profile worth implementing against would appear./

Yes that is all very exciting, but I promise to take a dry dull tone
with less cartoons in order to talk seriously about the roadmap and
risks ahead. The GeoTools community has a lot going on; plan for the
future with us./

GeoTools is part of the initial charge of Open Source Geospatial
Foundation projects. The library is available in a free and
business-friendly LGPL license.

Disclaimer: That dry dull tone was a joke, although it may be used
during the Q & A session (where I won’t have cartoons to back me up).

Jody Garnett is a representative of GeoTools Project Management
Committee has been working on making it better since 2003 (with a small
relapse in 2005 I admit – see honesty). Related projects such as GeoAPI,
GeoServer and uDig have occasionally suffered a commit.