This page gathers up some notes for those of us with a background in JUMP or OpenJUMP. The GeoTools project is built up around the same JTS topology library used by JUMP, many of the features and formats in JUMP (and now JTS) started out life as part of GeoTools library.

Question and Answer

Q: What is the equivalent of a Feature and FeatureSchema from JUMP in GeoTools?

Feature and FeatureType.

Here is a quick example:

FeatureType featureType = DataUtilities.createType( "example", "geom:Point,name:String,age:Integer,description:String" );

featureType.create( new Object[]{ point, name, description } );

If you have a Feature you can get the schema:

FeatureType schema = feature.getFeatureType();

If you have a collection of features you can get the schema:

FeatureType schema = featureCollection.getSchema();

The two feature models are very similar (and suffer from the same limitations).

Q: What license does GeoTools use?

LGPL. So you can take the code and run away with it. We do ask that you funnel fixes back in our direction.

Because of the GPL restriction on the JUMP code base we cannot offer you wrappers (or really very much help at all). If you would kindly consider a GPL+Claspath license (the same one that Java uses) we would be able to implement the JUMP Feature and FeatureSchema interfaces and we could get along without all this fuss.

Q: Can I just use the referencing stuff for reprojection

Yes. The Referencing module is available "standalone" (without all of the rest of the GeoTools feature model and rendering system). But be warned the referencing module is standards happy, and you will drag in a number of dependencies.

For more information please see the 07 Referencing page; and remember if you want to support EPSG codes you will need a plugin like epsg-wkt.

It is recommended that you store the CoordianteReferenceSystem in your Geometry user data.

Be warned that the referencing module does not depend on JTS (it is pure math), there is an example of how to transform JTS Geometry classes here: 02 JTS Utility Class.