[udig-devel] greets and self-introduction

[Mike Doberenz <fuwjax@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jody has suggested that I send this also to the udig-devel list.  If
you're also on geotools-devel, this is the same email I sent
yesterday.  Please excuse the inbox clutter.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mike Doberenz <fuwjax@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 16:41:37 -0600
Subject: greets and self-introduction
To: geotools-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Howdy all,

Richard suggested I post a little bio about myself to the mailing
list, though anyone listening on #geotools earlier will likely find
this repetitive.

My name is Michael Doberenz, and I'm currently employed by the Texas
Center for Applied Technology which through an involved hierarchy of
departments and organizations falls under the branches of the Texas
A&M University System.  I received both my BS (1997) and MS (1999) in
Applied Mathematics from Texas A&M University and in the years since
have found myself on various c++, java, and php software projects.

My current project is a training simulation for emergency responders.
A fundamental requirement of our software is that the participants
have spatial situational awareness, specifically our application must
have the ability to present asset locations on a GIS rendered map.  We
originally used ESRI products as I'm sure most of you have, but we
just couldn't get everything to work quite the way we wanted.  I wrote
a rudimentary map implementation from scratch which met enough of the
requirements to get us to a release version, but it's simply too
limited to get us through the next phase.

There are plenty of GIS toolkits out there, but coming from the web
world I believe the people who win in the long run are the ones who
follow standards, which led me to the geoapi interfaces and eventually
to geotools (right around the time of the transition to the new
website).  I made it through most of the tutorials and did a few proof
of concept projects to demonstrate that geotools would enable us to do
far more than my little hacked together map would ever allow.

About that time I stumbled on uDig in the subversion repository.  You
don't have to use Eclipse for too long before you wish you could use
it as a platform for your own project.  You don't have to wish that
for too long before you find out you can.  uDig might not be the Holy
Grail, but it is just about everything I've been trying to convince my
organization we should ideally have as a framework for our
applications.

I have convinced my boss that while moving to uDig for the next
version of our product may not speed our development time, it will
give us a far more polished and ultimately user friendly product.
Whether that's true or not, he has given me the go-ahead to help out
where I can on uDig and geotools, at least until more of the
requirements for our current project are worked out.

Jody has suggested I begin with CRS, specifically with "a simple ui
that lets people make their own CRS from scratch" which is
particularly useful to us in our project since the datum our client
uses isn't in the EPSG list.  Paul has offered to draw up some ideas
on the interface.  Tomorrow I will post a few initial impressions I
have from going through the geoapi and geotools implementation of CRS.

By the way, this is my first open source project, please feel free to
correct me whenever you deem necessary.

Thanks,
Michael Doberenz