uDig 1.5.0.RC1 Released

The uDig community is pleased to release uDig 1.5.0.RC1. 

Release Details

• uDig Downloads (Mac, Linux, and Windows)
• Release Notes
• Issue Tracker Change Log
• GitHub Tag

New Features

This release supports a couple new features:

• The web view down points to a GitHub page (rather than a wiki page). Thanks to Frank for this work.
  
• The style editor now supports arrows (as shown in the above map). Thanks to Emily and Refractions for this work.
  
• Packages have been changed to org.locationtech.udig allowing SDK developers to migrate at this time (see below).

Developers

Internally the package structure and extensions have changed from net.refractions.udig to org.locationtech.udig. This blog post describes how to setup a development environment and update your plugin accordingly.

Target Platform and Environment

For instructions on using the project straight from GitHub (and building from Eclipse or Maven) see the project README.
We also provide a uDig 1.5.0.RC1 SDK as a stand-alone target platform:

1. Download the SDK
2. Unzip the SDK into a udig-sdk folder.
3. Open up Windows > Preferences and navigate to the Target Platform page
4. Set the target platform to the location of your udig-sdk folder. This will take a few moments while the folder contents are scanned.
As a standalone target platform you can develop uDig with a recent version of Eclipse (uDig no longer depends on your development environment when running). The target platform also includes the JAI and ImageIO bundles which previously were installed as JRE Extensions.
Thanks to Frank for these ease-of-use improvements for uDig developers.

Dependency and Extension Point Migration

At a high-level your plugins must be updated to use the org.locationtech.udig packages and extensions. This can be accomplished with a search and replace, but we will take the time to point out strategies for updating a few specific files.

You can turn off eclipse automatic build when performing these changes to save time.

MANIFEST.MF

Required Bundles (Require-Bundle) and imported Packages (Import-Package) in MANIFEST.MF files should reflect the namespace schange as well. Its a simple search and replace within Eclipse (Search -> File...):

Click Replace... to change to new namespace:

Extension Points

Extension definitions based on uDig Extension Points have to be updated. Search for net.refractions.udig in your plugin.xml and feature.xml files and replace the string with org.locationtech.udig

Source Code Migration

With the build environment fixed up we can now move on to updating your source code.

You can turn on eclipse automatic build now, a lot of compile errors are expected after re-compilation against the new udig-sdk target-platform.

This time we can perform the same search and replace on "*.java" files. This should fix the vast majority of problems (as it updates both imports and any extension point references you happened to make use of in your Java code).
If any package import errors remain, click with right mouse on the project and hit Source and Organize Imports.

The uDig 1.5.0.RC1 is built using GeoTools 11.2. The GeoTools project provides an upgrade guide for those using a prior version of the library.

Looking Ahead

If you have any problems with the current udig-sdk or like to ask something we didn't addressed in this post feel free to contact us:

• IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
• #udig on freenode
• #geotools on freenode
• Via Twitter (@udigGIS)
• Developer mailing list at mailing list udig-dev@locationtech.org (subscribe here). 

The 2.0.0 Release expects no further API change, its only focus is the transition to Eclipse Luna (a branch is available for developers here).