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Title

JASPA, AN ALTERNATIVE TO POSTGIS  

Abstract

JASPA (JAva SPAtial) in an spatial extension developed in Java that brings spatial capabilities to PostgreSQL and H2 (others java databases will be supported in next releases). So far, PostGIS has been the spatial extension that leads the open source world. During the last years other open source solutions have been appeared.: Spatial Box, H2 Spatial, Spatial Lite, MySQL Spatial, etc. Some of them are quite a good approach to PostGIS but when we compare these products with PostGIS, we can notice important drawbacks. They do not support enough spatial functionality or they are not a good client-server solution or they do not support spatial indexes, etc. At this moment (march 2010), JASPA (version 0.1)  supports almost all the PostGIS (1.4.2) functionality and some of the PostGIS (1.5.1) functionality. JASPA implements 184 out of 190 PostGIS functions. JASPA implements all the OGC functionality plus almost all the PostGIS extensions, including spatial aggregates, arrays of geometries, set returning functions, spatial indexes (PostgreSQL), etc.

Currently, JASPA works with PostgreSQL (using PLJVA) and with H2 (without spatial indexes, hope we can improve this in a near future) and it is based on the JTS and GeoTools libraries. JASPA will be release under GPL.

PostGIS is developed mainly using C and plpgsql. For non computer science people, this languages and procedures make difficult to developed new stored procedures in C, GEOS and LWGEOM. For a cartographer, it would be easier to develop using java, because it is less tricky that C and because we are more used to this programming language. In fact, to develop a new stored procedure in JASPA together with the JTS and GeoTools libraries is much easier and it offers us a lot of possibilities.

In this paper we will talk about JASPA, its characteristics, performance, architecture and future work.

Authors

Jose Martinez-Llario - Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
Eloina Coll - Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
Marta Gonzalez - Universidad Politecnica de Valencia