[udig-devel] Re: JGrass and uDig

["Matthias Basler" <matthiasbasler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Antonello Andrea wrote:
[...]
> Lots of changes are going on at the moment in the JGrass team and
> architecture. One thought and wish of mine would be that to join the
> uDig development and merge all the raster algorythms into it, as well as
> everything suitable from JGrass. Following the last coverage changes in
> geotools, I guess this should be possible and would bring positive
> additions to both groups. Please take into consideration that this would
> anyway mean a hughe amount of work from our side.
> To understand if this could be in fact feasible, I would need to talk 
> to someone (or the IRC channel) about advantages and if and how this
> could be achieved. 
> 
> Please let me first of all know if the uDig team is interested in this
> and to who I may talk to about this issue.

Hi Antonello,

I am Matthias Basler, my minor part in uDig is the German translation and bug finding from time to time.

I think the idea of collaboration between JGrass and uDig is wonderful. On the university of Jena, Germany, where I studied Geography there Java and hydrology were two big topics. (You may know Prof. Flügel and/or Peter Krause.) Anyway, that's how I have gotten knowledge of JGrass - it was then at pre 1.0. I admit I havn't actally worked with it, for one reason because at that time there was no Englisch user manual.
Still I liked the idea as much as I like uDig for just making Open Source GIS finally "user friendly".

Now You will surely have to talk with the more involved people in uDig when it comes to making a plan. May I, however, ask you to provide some technical details about JGrass so that we/I can judge on what areas collaboration would be easy or more difficult. 
(Just as an example: I can already see from the manual that you use Swing whereas uDig uses SWT/JFace.)

Imho the plugin approach that you suggested sounds good. You'll find that you will, from time to time, run into problems or gaps trying to get advanced raster operations into uDig in its current state, but if this helps to get the "breakthrough" for advanced raster support and analysis in uDig it is definitely worth the work!

Please let us know any chat results.
-- 
Matthias Basler
matthiasbasler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx