GeoTools 1 began in 1999 at the University of Leeds by James MacGill as part of his PhD 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 to enable the execution of applets on a wide range of clients without the need for a plugin. 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 the latest Java platform and to follow OGC specifications. GeoTools since GeoTools 1 is no longer maintained, the "2" in "GeoTools 2" was dropped in 2007 and the project name became GeoTools. The version number followed suit in 2011 with the scheduled release of "GeoTools" version 8. == Disambiguation ==