By the end of the year, blueMarine should hopefully spin off another sub-project: ForceTen, focused on the world of map rendering and geotagging.

To tell the truth, I hoped to be able to spin it off earlier, but this month of September has been (and still is) extremely busy. At the moment I have only been able to move the relevant sources to a specific Subversion project (https://forceten.dev.java.net/svn/forceten/trunk/src), while the website (http://forceten.tidalwave.it) is not ready yet (but you can already subscribe to the news feed). Also, sources need some refactoring and have still dependencies on blueMarine, so you will need to change them if you want to use them now.

But maybe it's the time for posting a little teaser. The basic features of this component are:

• integration with different map renderers: SwingLabs JXMapViewer, NASA World Wind (done), possibly a JavaScript-based renderer (for running the Google Maps APIs and showing Google Maps in a legal way (*)) and a SVG renderer (for SVG data published by OpenStreetMap);
• integration with different geo-coding providers;
• support for drag-and-drop geotagging;
  
• specific integration with NetBeans (even though I'll try to publish some stuff as plain J2SE).

Here is a quick screencast (400k, QuickTime, low quality to keep the size small) of the currently implemented features showing off in blueMarine.

I'll be showing ForceTen capabilities integrated in blueMarine at the next NetBeans Tech Days in Milan, Rome and Cagliari.

PS The part of the screencast showing photos dragged on the map is achieved by integrating the NetBeans Visual Library: after the Light Table, another creative use of it. Stay tuned on the next issue of the NetBeans Magazine for more details on it!

(*) Which is technically possible with JXMapViewer but - sadly - not legal.

Technorati Tags: blueMarine, NetBeans, NetBeans RCP, JXMapViewer, NASA World Wind, geotagging, Visual Library