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As of summer 2006, this page is out of date. It will be replaced by information in the Users' Manual.

 

Introduction

Geotools offers many useful features for java programmers working with spatial data. This document gives some suggestions for getting started with the geotools toolkit.

Getting Geotools

Released Jars

Jars of Geotools releases are available for download .
Currently 2.0.0 is recommended. See the the 2.2 Dependencies page in the Developers Guide for dependancies that are required and not included in the release download.

Source Code

The source code is usually available as a download .
Nightly builds for Nightly Builds include the latest source code; you can follow the instructions here if you would like to access the code repository directly.

The Developers Guide section about 2.5 Using Maven describes building the geotools modules from the source code.

Learning the API

Geotools Documentation

Geotools documentation is spread over a few pages on this wiki site.

  • Feature List - an overview of geotools capabilities
  • [Users guide] - project information for new users
  • FAQ
  • Tutorials - discussions about sections of the geotools codebase with sample code
  • Snippets - short bits of sample code for specific tasks
  • Articles - miscellaneous documents
  • Reference

Tutorials

Working through the following Tutorials serves as a good introduction to the API.

These tutorials include UML diagrams explaining many aspects of the geotools design.

Additional (unfinished) tutorials are available explaining the use of raster data and graphs.

How to run the Spearfish demo includes additional information to help you get started.

User mailing list

The Geotools users and developers Mailing Lists may also have answers to your questions. You can search these and subscribe to them here.

If you cannot find the information you need on this website, feel free to ask questions on the geotools2 user mailing list: geotools-gt2-users@lists.sourceforge.net.

JavaDocs

It is often nice to learn an API by looking over the generated javadocs:

Demos

Some small demonstrations, listed in Demo Code and found in the /gt/demo/ directory (in svn), give examples of Geotools2 usage.

OGC implementation specifications

Geotools implements many Open Geospatial standards, so these documents are helpful.

JUnit Tests

The JUnit tests for each Geotools module are also a good source of example code. These can be found in the 'tests' directory of each module.

Products that use Geotools

Another source of example code is other java projects that use Geotools.

Internet Relay Chat

Joining the IRC channel

If you are new to IRC, you will need to find an IRC client. The later versions of Netscape and Mozilla have IRC built in, and you can connect to a GeoTools meeting simply by using the URL: irc://irc.freenode.net/geotools.

The information you need to configure your IRC client are:

  • Server - Pick one from Freenode Servers
  • Channel - #geotools
  • Port - 6667

You can jump on IRC at any point to meet the GeoTools team, or ask questions of other users.

Weekly Meeting

GeoTools developers meet regularly to discuss issues such as design. Meeting times are announced on the geotools-devel mailing list.

At the time of writing, developers meet weekly at 20:00 Monday UTC:

Zone City 24 hour 12 hour
UTC 2 CEST Rome 18:30 6:30 pm
UTC 0 London 16:30 4:30 pm
UTC -4 New York 12:30 12:30 pm
UTC -7 PDT Vancouver: 09:30 9:30 am

To figure out the time in your area try the following:

Useful Reference

Conventions

Documentation

A. Glossary
B. UML Legend
C. Symbols, Terms and Definitions