[udig-devel] SLD and Ecore

[Miles Parker <milesparker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

Perhaps the geotools list or wahtever would be a better place for this, but since the uDig approach is much more Ecore / Eclipse centric, I think I'll ask it here. I wonder if there has ever been any discussion about building an Ecore wrapper and/or similar higher level style description framework in Ecore (with XSD of course). I ask because SLD could be valuable as a more general style description specification (I mean outside of GIS).  I've defined a style description framework for agent-based models in the AMF tool but that is not even close to as fully featured and rather than build that out it would be nice to have a common base that other people had thought a lot about and implemented.  -- and there is probably a lot more than I need there so it might be nice to have a more modular approach.

I'm wondering chiefly because I don't want to be tied to XML based approaches. It is difficult to encode/decode and maintain outside of existing toolchains. Or at least I find it so, but then I'm still bumbling around quite a bit. In particular it would be really neat to have a programmatic model for directly interacting with styles. For example, I do a lot of code generation and it's actually pretty difficult to generate valid XML -- one missing > vs ;gt; or whatever and you've hosed the entire document. (XML is surprisingly and unnecessarily fragile I think.) And by having the full programming model you could easily (relativly) do things like having dynamically modifiying styles, etc.

cheers,

Miles