I am going to start off this tour with some completely useless non spatial information. The GeoTools library is big nasty (and plays with big nasty amounts of data) and as such is always slight ahead of its time. We run into the limits of Java - often years before good solutions show up. CanonicalSet Checked Collections Logging ObjectCache Other Collections WeakReference Collections In a perfect world none of these utility classes would need to exist - and we could just use software components from off the shelf projects. In many cases we have found that the volume of GeoSpatial information breaks assumptions made by projects such as commons collections - leaving us to roll our own.

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But this Stuff is in Java 6

These utility classes are just here to get the job done in Java 1.4; they have nothing to do with spatial anything. You will find examples of checked collections (yes I know that is available in Java 5); an implementation of an object cache (there is a JSR for that); and so on ...

Why are these things in the Metadata Module

Because metadata is the "lowest" jar in the software stack; needed by everyone else. These classes really are not interesting enough to seperate out into their own module.

Glue Code

This page also introduces some of the "glue code" needed used to hook up GeoTools to services provided by your project. You will find pages here covering logging and JNDI integration. For a more detailed discussion of how to integrate GeoTools into your application please review the advanced section on the 02 Integration Basics page.