[udig-devel] Google Summer Of Code

[Daniele Romagnoli]

Hi,
I'm Daniele Romagnoli, the Summer Of Code student working on the
ImageIO-GDAL integration proposal, having Simone Giannecchini as my Mentor.


Actually, I have analyzed GDAL (its functioning, its datamodel and its API)
and I have written a brief Report (which may be grown during development) on
these topics. I have built a simple VC++ project in order to test some GDAL
capabilities, learning how to use the APIs and examining several sections of
GDAL source code which allow to understand some GDAL inner mechanismes (as
an instance, the Blocks Caching Mechanism).

Moreover, I have studied the SWIG available documentation which provides
extensive explaination about SWIG topics: SWIG basics, SWIG C/C++ wrapping,
SWIG usage, typemaps (which allow to customize SWIG's behaviour pertaining
to type conversion between source language (C/C++) and destination
language),... A whole chapter of the documentation is connected to Java
bindings (The ImageIO-GDAL integration proposal aims to exploit GDAL within
JAVA imageIO). After this learning phase (which need some improvement
because SWIG is a very powerful and complex tool), I also have analyzed the
available Java bindings provided within the GDAL repository (both the
interface files and the generated wrappers) and I have added a simple
binding to better understand how to use SWIG. More precisely, I have exposed
the GDAL method which allows to retrieve the natural block size of a raster
band, which represents the most efficient chunk size to access the format.
During the GDAL-SWIG-WINDOWS setup process I have encountered some
difficults (during the building process) using Visual C++ Express Edition
(and wasting a bit of time).
Finally, I have installed Visual C++ 2003, tuned the makefile and now it
works.

I'm writing a report on SWIG in order to introduce basic SWIG concepts and
functioning as well as its main capabilities.
A special chapter will describe how SWIG provides wrapper for generating
JAVA code. Furthermore, a brief presentation of the available pre-existing
bindings will be introduced. In such a context, some useful (in order to
achieve ImageIO-GDAL integration) GDAL functionalities not yet wrapped by
SWIG will be presented.
In compliance to this, I'm gathering information and specifications of some
raster formats which may be choose to provide a final working example of
ImageIO plugin which make use of GDAL (by handling metadata, coordinate
reference systems, tyling and other main concepts). As an instance, an
interesting format may be HDF-EOS or DOQ. This would help to better
understand what bindings need to be added.

Best regards,
Daniele Romagnoli
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