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postgresqlgrailsgeolocationgrails-ormgeospatial

Proper way of representing UTM coordinates in Grails / GORM / PostgreSQL and working with them

I need to store the geographic location of a few physical locations in my Grails/GORM/PostgreSQL based software.

Not a whole lot (about a 100), and there won't be any geo-spatial searches or calculations based on them (although I will have to render them onto a map - probably using a HTML5 canvas).

What are my options for representing and storing them in the GORM object model and in PostgreSQL? Which one is the best?

The incoming format for the coordinates is UTM so something like "29U E 323 314.000 N 3232 111.000". Storing this as text seems bad.

I've looked at PostGIS but I'm concerned it is a bit of overkill (as I need no real geospatial queries) and I'm not sure it integrates with GORM well.

Is there a Java (or Grails) standard simple library for working with coordinates? I've looked at GeoTools and OpenMap so far, and some others which appeared abandoned.

Right now I'm thinking using one of these libraries to transform my UTM coordinates to latitude/longitude, and store those as a pair of doubles - then figure out a way how to project those onto a map again when it comes time to render.

Solution

  • This tutorial and sample class solved my needs for coordinate conversion:

    http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-coordconvert

    Now I'm storing a location object with latitude/longitude doubles (as embedded) in database, and plan to stick with that.

    Rendering to a HTML5 canvas (thus another set of coordinate translation) is still outstanding though.

    P.S. GeoTools has a very complex API, OpenMap appear to hate Maven ("We prefer SVN").