UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGY
Java: 
Why GIS People Should Care
Chris Andrews

In the past 10 years, geographic information systems (GIS) exploded from a highly specialized, esoteric discipline into a broad horizontal technology that encompasses hardware development, map making, data generation, and complex software integration. Along the way, GIS technology changed as GIS grew to interact with a variety of hardware interfaces, data storage tools, and programming languages. Despite this diversity in GIS implementation, many GIS professionals fail to educate themselves about the importance of standard tools that are taking hold in the GIS industry. Thus, I am never surprised when I am asked to defend or even identify the relationship between GIS and a key element of modern technology integration, the Java programming language.

Sun Microsystems, Inc., announced the release of Java to a wide audience in 1995. Most of the hype around this new programming language focused on the interoperability of Java on multiple operating system (OS) platforms. Notably, many Web developers began developing Java "applets" to perform complex Web page graphics operations that were previously not possible. These programmers encountered many early Java problems transporting their applets across Web browsers and across OS graphical user interfaces (GUI). While the Java Community Process (JCP) dramatically improved the GUI capabilities of the language, since the early days of Java's release many public and private organizations have quietly embraced Java to implement platform independent server functionality that is not dependent on a GUI. Java is now one of the most widely used programming languages for technology integration.

As an established standard for server-side Internet development, Java-capable servers dominate the Internet. According to the Netcraft, Ltd. website, approximately 72% of Internet servers use Java-compatible Web server software, including Apache, Sun One, and Zeus. This percentage reaches approximately 94% when considering that Microsoft's IIS can also be configured to run Java server software with third party software. The remaining 6% includes many Java-compatible Web servers, the exact types of which are not counted by Netcraft. As the GIS world moves toward providing better Web-based mapping functionality and distributed spatial computing over the Internet, Java arises as a viable, perhaps preferable, option for integrating GIS into the Web.

The open standards community naturally embraces community maintained programming languages as the most appropriate implementation tools for open projects. Sun developed the JCP as a forum for changing the Java language to meet the evolving requirements of the information technology (IT) industry. The JCP includes companies, individuals, and agencies that desire to have input on the growth and change of the definition of Java. While there are other truly open standards programming languages that can be used to customize GIS, Java carries the robustness and power to support integration tasks and primary functional development tasks. For example, Vivid Solutions, Inc., implemented a robust topology toolkit called the JTS Topology Suite (JTS). JTS, an open source Java project, allows Java programmers to perform 2D spatial operations such as identifying donut polygons and intersecting shapes. With the help of tools such as the geospatial specifications provided by the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), open source tools like JTS can be integrated with other standards-based Java tools to provide complete, standardized Java geospatial solutions.

Community support for GIS and Java integration grows every year. The establishment of a suite of standards by the OGC has helped developers to build applications with a set of predefined rules for constructing geospatial applications. Numerous open and proprietary Java GIS packages already exist. MapInfo Corporation led the field with an IT-standard Java mapping package called MapXtreme Java. Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI), also jumped on the Java bandwagon early with a Java GUI for ArcView IMS. More recently ESRI ported its MapObjects platform to the MapObjects Java version. The market's Java-based GIS offerings are rapidly evolving from awkward GUI-focused toolkits to fully functional geospatial advanced programming interfaces.

Java technology has quietly infiltrated the GIS world and forms a key component of GIS integration projects. Many government agencies adopted Java as an enterprise standard in the last several years and preferentially select Java-capable vendors and products. Populous countries such as Brazil and China promote open source technology as a cheaper development alternative and Java is a major facilitator for open source implementation. Numerous new tools such as JTS and the Oracle Spatial Java API allow non-GIS Java programmers access to complex GIS storage and manipulation functionality. Java technology has helped to open GIS to the broader IT industry. Traditional GIS professionals ignore the proliferation of Java at their own risk.

About the Author
Chris Andrews has been a GIS and Java advocate for the past eight years, programming and listening to customers in a variety of environments from private industry to the Kennedy Space Center. Chris is currently employed as a GIS Solution Architect at Idea Integration in Denver, Colorado, and may be contacted at chris.andrews@ idea.com.

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