[Dspatial-develop] DSpatial update

[Patrick V. L. <pva...@us...>]

Version 0.3 is well underway, although it will still be a while before
it can be released. This upcoming release will see a number of quite
important changes to the kernel and kernel access. You can check the
status of these and other changes from our Code status page.

First of all, the locking mechanism has completely changed. Locking is
now initiated at the "user" level (that is, outside of the kernel),
where the kernel generates a token suitable for the requested access.
The application needs to explicitly drop the token when done. This
dramatically reduces the number of locks that needs to be made, because
an application can access multiple data set attributes or perform
multiple operations before dropping the token. On the down side, a badly
written application can lock a data set indefinitely.

Secondly, the first analysis functions on rasters will be made
available. Basic functions (reading and writing of raster data bands,
data type conversion) will be part of the kernel, while basic arithmetic
on raster bands will be provided through the gridmath module, which will
be released together with kernel release 0.3.

Thirdly, the kernel will be cross-platform compatible. Compiler
directives have been added to enable compilation on D5, D7 and Kylix
(anybody any experience with D6?). If you want to get started with
DSpatial on Kylix right away, you can now download the code from the CVS
at SourceForge. Note that the HDF format driver does not yet work with
Kylix.

Lastly, user level data access will be more sophisticated, where the
application can request specific areas of a raster band, or use a filter
that represents a number of rows in a raster band and which also
supports relative pixel addressing.

Version 0.3 is scheduled for release sometime in February.

On the administrative side, we welcome Fred Esberg as a new member of
the developers team. Fred has extensive and broad experience with
Delphi, particularly in database access, statistics, and image
progressing. Fred is responsible for the development of the orbit module
for image processing.

All the best for the New Year,
DSpatial Development Team