May 13 2007
Worldwind Java - Jython example
The worldwind java sdk has finally been released. It’s a neat SDK, well organized, easy to bring into Eclipse with some good examples to start hacking away.
The only problem is the examples are written in Java 
. If braces make you cringe but you still want to work with all the excellent Java libraries out there, you’ll want to take a look at Jython. Taking the AWT1Up.java code and porting a subset of the functionality to Jython was surprisingly easy and yielded much more readable code in my opinion. And the ability to manipulate objects at the interactive prompt is just so sweet.
Setup is not too terrible:
- Get a Java JDK (I’m using sun java 6)
- Download and install Jython 2.2b2
- Download and unzip the worldwind java sdk (ex: /opt/wwj )
- Set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to /opt/wwj
- Set your CLASSPATH variable to /opt/wwj/worldwind.jar
- Run jython wwj_demo.py
One thing that is a bit disappointing with the WorldWind SDK in general is the lack of support for rendering common formats. Maybe I missed something but I couldn’t get gpx or georss feeds working properly. It is version 0.2 so I expect support for GeoRSS and GPX to improve and for GML, KML, GeoJSON, Shapefiles, Rasters, WMS, etc to be included eventually.
Anyone else out there started playing with Jython / Worldwind yet?
The World Wind .NET client has had an IronPython console plugin for a while.
http://forum.worldwindcentral.com/showthread.php?t=8882
http://pneumatictu.be/modelfrompython.png
It’s hard to do much in it without any kind of command completion though.
Though I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, I think there’s a lot of potential for combining GeoTools with WorldWind, as they’re both java based. GeoTools provides access to Shapefiles, PostGIS, ArcSDE, Oracle Spatial, DB2, MySQL, WFS, WMS, GeoTiff, ArcGrid, image files, and soon ECW, MrSID, JPEG2000, NetCDF and more.
Hi Matt,
I am new to Jython, yet couldn’t help to notice that the windows shown for this article seem to come from a Windows Vista system (?). So how can a shebang note be interpreted right there?
Or am I totally offtrack?
I am currently try to evaluate the Jython route for the WWJ SDK, yet got problems setting things up. I got some notions of the regurlar Python implementation, but i am new to Jython. I’d basically like to give your script and demo app a shot on my machine (WinXP) for a project evaluation.
I would appreciate it very much if you could give me some pointers and hints on this.
Thank you for your time,
best regards,
Christophe Leske
Got it to work! Yippieh-Yah-Yah Yeah!
Sorry for cluttering the blog…
C
Christophe,
No that’s not Vista .. just the Vista-like theme from the Emerald Theme Manager on Linux. I haven’t tried this on Vista (or windows at all actually) so if you’ve got it working, are there any special hints/tricks that people should know about?
-matt