GeoTools

GeoTools is a free software (LGPL) GIS toolkit for developing standards compliant solutions. It provides an implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications as they are developed. GeoTools is a contributor of the GeoAPI project - a vendor-neutral set of Java interfaces derived from OGC specifications - and implements a subset of those.

It is written in Java and currently is under active development. It is used by GeoServer and UDig projects.

History
GeoTools 1 began in 1996 at the University of Leeds as part of a Masters project. It aimed to provide a toolkit of resources to enable the creation of interactive geographic visualization clients. GeoTools 1 was built using the Java 1.1 environment so as to enable the execution of applets on a wide range of clients without the need for a plug-in. It was developed in a rather ad hoc manner, with new features being added as needed. GeoTools 1 was not built with any standards in mind.

GeoTools 2 began in 2002. It was a rewrite from scratch with contributions by an international group of developers. The code base has been fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of latest Java platform and to follow OGC specifications. Since GeoTools 1 is no longer maintained, the "2" in "GeoTools 2" has been dropped in 2007 and the project name became GeoTools.