autoredistrict icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
autoredistrict copied to clipboard

Use geotools for shapefile functionality

Open carlschroedl opened this issue 9 years ago • 2 comments

We depend on geotools and a lot of tools that depend on geotools at the USGS. It's a stable, well-tested, actively-developed, and widely-used geospatial library. We can import only the shapefile functionality into autoredistrict.

Docs on the shapefile module: http://docs.geotools.org/latest/userguide/library/data/shape.html

Advantages of geotools over current checked-in dependencies:

  • it has automated tests, and by virtue of being widely-used, is battle-tested against many corner cases
  • many GS-savvy developers are already familiar with the geotools APIs, so it would lower the barrier to contribution
  • geotools has official support for a very large list of geospatial data that we could add autoredistrict support for in the future
  • the geotools project publishes their artifacts in maven central so if we move to a formal dependency management solution like maven, gradle, or ivy, we could stop checking in the jar

carlschroedl avatar Jan 23 '16 04:01 carlschroedl

the only functionality i need from shapefile is:

  • read in the shapes, to coordinates
  • read and write the .dbf data

i found the smallest and simplest package i could for that and used only what was needed.

i want to keep unneccessary code complexity to a minimum.

happyjack27 avatar Jan 23 '16 17:01 happyjack27

need some enhancement ideas that would justify the extra code first. no need to add the extra code if there literally is no need to add the extra code.

happyjack27 avatar Jan 29 '16 16:01 happyjack27