Friday, March 20, 2009

udigLite: An OSGi-friendly subset of uDig

Depending on your environment, you may find it hard to integrate other OSGi bundles or Eclipse plug-ins with uDig. My team and I have tried for some time to build a viewer application for a proprietary car navigation database format on top of uDig 1.1 releases or uDig 1.2 trunk snapshots, fighting with version conflicts and class loader issues caused by the "grab all you need" plug-in net.refractions.udig.libs.

The root of these problems is Geotools and its dependency on the META-INF/services mechanism, which requires some trickery to be made compatible with OSGi.

We have now succeeded in creating a minimal subset of uDig and Geotools which solves these conflicts by turning all Geotools and third-party libraries into separate bundles. For technical reasons, we had to work with cloned repositories, which should simply be regarded as a uDig working branch.

More details about udigLite can be found in the uDig wiki. Have a look at my blog to get an idea of what we are using uDig for.

Finally, thanks for all the support from the uDig community so far - we very much hope to join forces to bring the results of this activity back into uDig trunk.

1 comment:

Microsoft Office 2007 said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.