Bolsena #2 - coordinate system ramblings

Time for an update, even though there's not much to discuss on actual progress.

First for some good news, the resource dependencies pull request is finally here! It would be great if many of you would test it out, with 189 commits it's the biggest change since our move to GitHub yet, and although the unit and integration tests are working some details might still need some tuning.

Since my last post, I've been thinking and experimenting with the coordinate subsystem in deegree. The API is currently heavily based on the GML representation of coordinate systems, with references everywhere, for  axis, datums, ellipsoids and so on.

While I'm a friend of models that are 'complete', I'm not sure whether that's the best approach for coordinate systems. There are two major use cases for the CRS package. One is to keep the information on what system is being used with what identifier, the other is to transform coordinates from one system to another. Other use cases would be to import/export coordinate system definitions from/to GML, WKT, proj4 etc.

A review of the code revealed that all identifiers are stored in lower case. So exporting to GML or finding out exactly what identifiers exist for a given system is impossible, because the proper identifiers do not exist. The convenient use case of having eg. your layer configuration set up with the correct CRS identifier from the datastore also becomes impossible sometimes, in case the underlying data store is not configured explicitly with a CRS identifier.

So to summarize, the current package has several shortcomings. First is the identifier mess, which is not easily fixed short of a complete reimport of CRS definitions (which would override some manually modified definitions). Second is the model, which is just too complex and makes it hard to compare two definitions. Third, transformations are slow, sometimes not thread safe, sometimes they are synchronized and thus not scalable on multicore machines. Four, the whole system is statically initialized and makes heavy use of global static state.

I've tried unsuccessfully to fix some of these issues the past days, but I fear a complete rewrite is the only thing that will do the trick.