JTS - Links to Geometry APIs and papers

Motivated by a thread on the GEOS list about the Boost.Polygon library, I've added some new resources to the JTS web site, including:

• a list of geometry APIs
• a section of references to papers about topics in Computational Geometry which are relevant to JTS.

The resources have been factored out onto this page.

Over the years of working with JTS I've read a ton of interesting and sometimes even useful academic papers about aspects of Computational Geometry. I hope to start documenting these on this page, perhaps with some (no doubt opinionated) comments about applicability. A treasure trove for Geometry geeks!

Super Zoom Control is really super!

The web mapping site 192.com has a very nice map zoom control which dynamically displays a representative image of the map at the prospective zoom level.


This nicely addresses a problem which has occurred in a few applications I've been involved with recently - how to communicate to the user what a given zoom level actually looks like.

At first I thought the control might be truly dynamic - i.e. pulling a live tile from the centre point of the current map view. But it's actually just a set of tile snippets at a fixed point. Still, it provides a very nice effect. (The dynamic version would be simple to implement, but perhaps would be too slow in actual use, with unpredicatable latency).

Are you listening, OpenLayers?

Visualizations of Sorting Algorithms in your browser

Here's a nifty web page which shows a way of visualizing the operation of various common sorting algorithms.

Sample output for Heapsort:



The coolest thing about this of course is the ability to dynamically generate rich graphics in the browser. All hail the HTML5 <canvas> element!