[udig-devel] Announcement: GeoWidgets 0.2 ready. Comments appreciated

[Matthias Basler <Matthias.Basler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi uDig and GeoTools developers,

after two weeks of brainstorming and coding work I am happy to announce the
first public release of "GeoWidgets". As I had said a bit earlier (in the uDig
mailing list) the GeoWidgets project is to be a layer on top of GeoTools or
own/other geographical libraries to provide commonly used geographically
relevant widgets, such as CRS selection/assembly, legends and or map panels.
I decided to make it LGPL-licensed in order to be compatible to GeoTools/uDig.

Currently I have mainly finished the CRS widget group, which allows a user to
select a CRS from a list of available ones (with the EPSG database working
behind the scenes) or to build its own CRS from its child objects like CS,
geodetic datums, projections (in case of ProjectedCRS). Integrated are smaller
standalone widgets such as the Unit selection dropdown.
The CRS widget group is currently available as Swing implementation, i will soon
start trying to build an implementation based on Eclipse's property sheets,
which I hope might be usable by uDig.

GeWidgets is still at the beginning. I tried to design the code somewhat similar
to GeoTools in using factories and a factory finder (and utilizing several
GeoTools factories). On top of them sits the UI layer implementation, which
could be everything: Swing, SWT, Eclipse, Netbeans platform, ...
UI customization support and localization support are also there (The widgets
and error messages are fully externalized.) Still there are issues to solve,
e.g. concerning projected CRS or maybe design flaws that you find when
reviewing the code. So this is NOT a "stable" release and the API and
interfaces are likely subject to change, depending on your feedback.

I hope that this code will be of some help and maybe can grow to a full-size set
of geographical widgets. For this, I am thankful for any comments, any help and
participation. I'd like to closely collaborate with GeoTools/uDig and others
interested in this matter, since there were already some widgets developed that
would fit into the project quite nicely.

"GeoWidgets" does not yet have a home page. I'm thinking about setting up a
SourceForge project for it, but wanted to get your ideas about that first.

In the meantime you can download the GeoWidgets (bin+src) from
  www.earthflight.org/downloadother/GeoWidgets_v0.2.0_full.zip
or without the required libraries (Geotools etc.), but much smaller:
  www.earthflight.org/downloadother/GeoWidgets_v0.2.0_lite.zip

There are also screenshots showing the CRS widget group for Geographic CRS in
action:
  www.earthflight.org/downloadother/CRS_Widget_Screenshot.png
and a newer one with Projected CRS:
  www.earthflight.org/downloadother/CRS_Widget_Screenshot2.png

More details are in the GeoWidgets_Readme.txt contained in the .jar files.

Matthias Basler
c9bama@xxxxxxxxxxx

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