W3DS Implementation for Developers

The W3DS implementation was developed on top of Geoserver. It is implemented as a community module. Community modules are considered pending while being developed, and they are not officially part of the GeoServer releases. In the future, it might became a Geoserver extension, or can be included in the core.

The source code is written in JAVA, and the major dependencies are the Geoserver and Geotools. The W3DS source code is available in GitHub. It will be easy to download, study, modify and to compile an updated version.

Questions and comments about the W3DS implementation can be posted on the [Geoserver developer's mailing list].

Requirements
To be able to download, modify and compile the W3DS, it is necessary a working JAVA development environment. We provide detailed instruction for an Eclipse based environment.

Installing the developing environment

Background
This section can be skipped by developers familiar with Eclipse and Spring. Others not familiar with Eclipse should take some time to learn it. It is powerful IDE for JAVA (and for other languages as well), but not easy for novice users.

The following starting materials might be useful:


 * Eclipse Starter Guide
 * Eclipse Tips

Developers without previous experience with Spring and Wicket should understand the basics of each framework.

Spring is heavily used in Geoserver. Apache Wicket is used to develop the HTML interface.

Apache Wicket for dummies
Hello world