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GEOS is one of the more important open source projects in the GIS/geospatial industry. It provides rich functionality for analyzing and manipulating geometries and is a key part of PostGIS.

A few months ago I described how to use GEOS from Ruby. Back then, it was fairly painful and involved getting down and dirty with SWIG and your favorite compiler.

Happily time moves on. Sandros and Mateusz have done a ton of refactoring over the last couple of months and the Geos 3.0 release is at last in site (hopefully it will happen a bit later this summer). And I've checked in a number of changes that improve the Python and Ruby bindings.

The most significant change is that its now much easier to compile the bindings. All you have to do is:

./configure --enable-python --enable-ruby

You'll still need SWIG 1.3.29 installed, but the plan is to include the SWIG generated wrappers in the distribution so you won't need SWIG at all. And if you're on Windows, the bindings compile without problems using Visual C++ 2005. I still need to check MingW.

So if you have some time, grab the latest from CVS and see if the bindings compile and work on your platform.

I'd particularly like to get feedback from Python users. Since I use Ruby day in and day out, I know the right Rubyisms to put into the bindings. But I don't know Python well enough to get the Pythonisms right. So let me know if there are things missing like special methods or iterators, and I'll add them in. Comments should be posted to the geos devel mailing list so everyone can see them.