Re: openMap and VisAD

• To: jim schmidt <j-m.schmidt@xxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: openMap and VisAD
• From: Russ Rew <russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 11:17:04 -0700

Jim,

> Has anyone evaluated the OpenMap java library or perhaps used it
> with VisAD?
> 
>    ref:   http://openmap.bbn.com/

I looked at it a couple of months ago.  I think it's well-designed,
with everything done as Beans, which makes it useful for components.

On the other hand, I think there were a couple of problems with
respect to using OpenMap with VisAD:

 - OpenMap Layers are Swing Components, which makes them lightweight
   and not useful for Java3D windows.

 - You might have to adopt some of the OpenMap framework that duplicates
   functionality already in VisAD, using the OpenMap Projection
   classes, for example.

But the benefits of the freely-available OpenMap components might be
worthwhile.  In particular, their shapefile implementation can access
database information in the .dbf file associated with the shapefile,
for names of political regions, rivers, highways, etc.  The Unidata
shapefile classes used with VisAD currently only access the geometric
information ...

--Russ

_____________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                         UCAR Unidata Program
russ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                     http://www.unidata.ucar.edu