Review on the history of JTS and GEOS
JTS and GEOS are the backbone of most Open Source GIS applications. JTS is a java-based API implementing the Simple Features Specification and providing a lot of feature analysis tools. GEOS is the geometry engine for the PostGIS database. So a review of the history of such prominent pieces of GI-libraries is really worthy to read, especially if it is written by one of the key persons of these projects (Martin Davis).
Actually it is interesting to see, that developing GEOS was more a hassle than expected, because it really required more time to evolve. GEOS is written in C++ so all the object life cycle management had to be controlled within the code of GEOS itself and not automatically such as in JTS using Java. So one of the conclusions to me is that JTS is far more mature than GEOS and that Java is the first choice, when setting up complex algorithms for GI-applications (especially for prototyping).
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