JScience 3.0, a comprehensive Java library for the scientific community, has been released. It is a major upgrade to leverage JDK 1.5 class paramaterization capabilities. Also new in this version:

• A rigourous mapping of mathematical structures (Group, Ring, Field, etc.)
• A geographic coordinates module GIS/ISO compliant (with support for conversions between UTM, Lat/Long, XYZ, etc).
• A very useful measures module for exact or approximated measurements (also provides accurate physical constants)
• JScience units/quantities modules are now part of the JSR-275 (Units specification) namespace and should be included with the standard Java library sometimes in the future.

I work with RFID and locationing so I was interested to see the coordinate system support. I like the very OO design of all the APIs in JScience. But the Javadoc is pretty light on explanation. I mean, it seems I need a pretty deep background in OpenGIS and maybe some other standards to understand the rationale behind some of the API design. I'd love to ask the author some questions. I would also suggest documenting this stuff a lot more (again, I am concerned personally more with the coordinate system stuff) in order to gain wider adoption if that's your goal.

Thanks,
Scott Stirling
Framingham, MA

We started to provide some tutorial/code examples:
http://jscience.org/api/overview-summary.html#TUTORIAL

There are a lot of things to say... I am currently contemplating writing a book ("JScience for Dummy") which would go in depth in explaining the rationale for most of the architectural decisions and would help in properly using the library.

At the same time, we have many more modules to integrate and limited resources. Hence the trade-off between documentation and functionality...

I am currently contemplating writing a book ("JScience for Dummy") which would go in depth in explaining the rationale for most of the architectural decisions and would help in properly using the library.

Judging from the amount of interest JScience has stirred up on these pages, it's sure to fly off the shelves!

ha-ha (Nelson Muntz's laugh)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Judging from the amount of interest JScience has stirred up on these pages, it's sure to fly off the shelves!

Sure, I can see there will be a lot of potential customers for a "JScience for Dummy" book ;)

Looks great! Java has always been a bit lacking in this area, this will be a welcome addition to my toolbox.