Mapping Hacks

David Blasby, the new maintainer of GeoServer, has had a pretty keen idea -
why, he reckons, shouldn’t all databases have spatial geometry
columns, operations, and indexes, rather than just the usual suspects, like
Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. He’s hacked a wrapper around the Java Topology
Suite (the precursor to Refractions’s excellent GEOS library, which PostGIS
uses) with libgcj, and voilá — it’s a Spatial Database in a
Box. Currently, there’s support for Apache’s Derby (aka IBM’s Cloudscape),
PostgreSQL and HSQLDB, a Java database engine. Personally, I’d like to see an
SQLite port, as well. Although this project is still at a very embryonic stage,
it’s interesting to see the idea of spatial databasing abstracted out in a way
that can be put to use on more and different platforms, like embedded systems,
for example. We’ll be watching this one.

Posted in software |

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