The Eclipse Foundation has announced LocationTech - a new initiative meant to help enterprises build location aware systems.
Established as an Eclipse Industry Working Group and operating under the governance of the Eclipse Foundation, LocationTech is a platform providing enterprises and developers the infrastructure and governance needed to develop their location aware systems:
Infrastructure:
- A distributed code repository (Git)
- A bug tracking system (Bugzilla)
- A continuous integration server (Hudson)
- A build server farm
- A code review system (Gerrit)
- Project dashboard (Drupal)
- Web hosting (Apache & Drupal)
- Download site
Guidance on:
- How projects are formed and released.
- Providing openness to anyone, even competitors.
- Making design or roadmap decision.
- Becoming a committer.
Trust for:
- Validating code provenance
- Detecting license conflicts
- Trademark search and management
- Analysis of dependencies and transitive dependencies
Currently, LocationTech hosts three projects in the phase of proposals (see the Eclipse Development Process):
- Geoff (Geo Fast Forward) - Enabling existing Eclipse RCP applications to visualize geospatial information on a geographical map embedded into those applications.
- GeoScript – Provides APIs to access GeoTools – an Open Source Java GIS Toolkit – functionality from other languages such as Groovy, JavaScript, Python, and Scala.
- User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) – a desktop application providing support for using, manipulation, exploration and analysis of GIS data
The LocationTech founding members are: Actuate, IBM, OpenGeo, and Oracle, the initiative being “open to any organization with an interest in adding location awareness to their business.”