Sunburned Surveyor wrote: > This message is directed mostly at Frank, but I included the JPP mailing > list in case other JPP Developers want to comment. > > I've been thinking some more about a binary format for the exchange of > features, and I have been taking a look at the API for Java's > DataInputStream class and DataOutputStream class. They contain methods > that can read and write primitive Java datatypes. They can even read and > write String objects as seqences of Unicode character values with a > character count. At first glance it looked like this was everything we > needed to create a parser and writer for a binary feature exchance format. > > However, I'm concerned about how interoperability with other programming > languages of a binary file written with these Java classes. For example, > if you create a file with a computer that has a 64-bit microprocessor > does the writeInt() method write an integer to the file using 4 bytes or > 8 bytes? (The API documentation says it only uses 4 bytes.) I also think > we would want to stay away from the writeUTF() and readUTF() methods, > since it sounds like they write a funky character encoding that other > programming languages might have trouble with. I think we'll want to > write our own character counter byte and the individual unicode > character values with writeChar() or writeChars() method instead. > > Do you guys have any comments on this?
Landon, UTF-8 is fine with other languages, and is essentially ASCII when no unusual characters are used. For binary types it is important to be very precise about their sizes the the format specification. You mentioned earlier that you current interest is in the a "single feature" format, which is of little interest to me. I'm essentially interested in a replacement format for Shapefiles with none of their limitations for field types and with a geometry that is directly the simple features geometry model instead of a relatively close analog. It is also important to me that it be indexable, though I'm happy to handle the indexes as separate files that are specified later. Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Jump-pilot-devel mailing list Jump-pilot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jump-pilot-devel
