Work began on the GeoTools library in 1996 at the University of Leeds as part of a masters project to viusalize the results produced by the Geographical Analysis Machine (GAM) over the web. Not long after the first simple map display was up and running a seperate project within the Geography department at Leeds, which was looking at ways to develop and research Public Paricipation GIS (PPGIS), used the library to create an online map of the village of slaithwaite to allow the locals to discuss their thoughts about various planning issues.

The library was developed rapidly in response to the needs of this second project and the resulting toolkit, which was targeted at the Java Applet API, still exists as GeoTools-Lite . GeoTools 1 was not built with OpenGIS standards in mind (or any standards for that matter).

GeoTools 1 aimed to provide a toolkit of resources to enable the creation of interactive geographic visualization clients. GeoTools 1 was built using the Java 1.1 environment so as to enable the execution of applets on as wide a range of clients as possible without the need for a plug in. It was developed in a rather ad-hoc manner, with new features being added as and when needed.

GeoTools 1 is not being actively extended by its original development team though it would be excelent if users want to help move it from its current state (version 0.8) to a stable 1.0 release.