Re: [udig-devel] Udig-Integration and automation

["andrea antonello" <andrea.antonello@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Helmut,
I think you are in the position I was about a year (perhaps about two
now... time moves fast :)) ago.
I did the same search and landed with tests on jump, visad, gvsig and udig.
I then fell in love with udig, because even if many users still prefer
gvSig or other products because of similitude with known applications,
udig saves the lifes of those who develop.
Apart of a highly reactive mailinglist and helpfull developers there
is a big strenght behind udig, which is the eclipse rcp. When nothing
else works, you can still open one of the great eclipse rcp books and
solve your problem the RCP way. This is mandatory in my opinion, if
you want to maintain the product. Good documentation saves lifes :)

Regarding your needs, I do not see huge problems. I don't know how
pearl behaves with JNI, but if it does, you should be fine.
In JGrass we work with JNI to get through C to fortran and back, which
seems to be your same problem. So if that is the question, then yes,
it works.

I don't understand exactly what you need to do some prototyping.
Perhaps some other developer will be more elegant in answering you.
Anyway there are several code snippets to do the things you ask for,
like zooming and drawing things or create temporary features, etc etc.

Ciao
Andrea



On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Helmut Seidel <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I think this is going to be a quite long text ... :-[
>
> For more the ten years I am developing and maintaining a (commercial)
> German-Gis-Application, or better the non graphical alphanumerical part
> of it. The application is written mostly in objectorientated Perl, the
> graphical output (the mapstuff) is via a windows-based cad-application
> (autocad/intellicad) per ActiveX-automation - so my app runs only on
> windows-systems though my part of the code is plattform independent.
> For long years I've been looking for a suitable Cad/Mapping-Framework to
> make my whole application plattformindependent. In recent days two
> frameworks came up which would be suitable (gvSig and Udig). gvSig,
> though very powerful, seems to be very cryptic and complicated (most of
> my useres are ordinary clerks) and most of the code is commented in
> Spanish. So I fell in love with Udig which looks very straight forward.
>
> My first Idea was to port my whole App-Framework to java and integrate
> it into Udig. After a little thought I found this impossible for mainly
> three reasons:
> - I would have to maintain two branches of code, for several users will
> continue to use the existing Framework and pay for the maintainence.
> - Second, this is the main reason, this porting would mean to port
> several hundredthousand code-lines, a work I simply cannot afford. I
> certainly will port some smaller parts but not the entire thing.
> - Third I love my perl ;-)
>
> The idea I'm favouring now is to write or use some kind of glue-class,
> possibly written in C++ (via JNI) or java which allows function-calls
> from or to Udig. There are only three functions which have to be called
> from my application:
> - zoom to a certain point (or better window) of the drawing.
> - switch a layer on or off
> - draw some kind of mark (i.e. a circle) to a certain point.
>
> And at the moment only one function to be called from Udig in my
> application (i.e. sent an identity-string of some item to a function in
> my application, to display the corresponding data).
>
> The procedure could be as follows: on starting my app or on the first
> call an Application-Object of Udig is created and stored. The
> Function-calls would be via this object. Reversly on the first call from
> Udig to my app a similar Object would be created and stored.
>
> This sounds quite easy so far except that I have no experience in
> writing such interfaces. So my questions are: Do you think this would be
> possible (I think this could be of interest to many others)? And has
> anybody already done somthing similar who could give me some hints where
> and how to start?
>
> Thanks for reading my long post and I hope you could understand all of
> my clumpsy English. I'm looking forward to your replys.
>
> Thanks Helmut
>
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