Proposal: drop support for primitives and geostore and make each parser standalone

[jgravois]

at this point it might be a good idea to trim down the scope of Terraformer

proposal

we continue to maintain the repositories below, and refactor them to follow the pattern in arcgis-to-geojson-utils

• https://github.com/esri/terraformer-wkt-parser
• https://github.com/esri/terraformer-arcgis-parser

we deprecate/retire:

• Primitives
• spatial operations
• https://github.com/Esri/terraformer-geostore

we gut the repo here so that it contains only the documentation site for the parsers

• https://github.com/Esri/Terraformer

what say you @JerrySievert @patrickarlt @ajturner anyone/everyone else?

i would love help, but i'm not the kind of guy to delegate my own proposals

[JerrySievert]

i know that the wkt parser and the arcgis parser are both in use.

i am also planning on pulling in the primitives and spatial operations into another platform using terraformer. i feel that if we took those away, it would make terraformer unusable.

[JerrySievert]

i would also support moving terraformer to its own organization (ala koopjs), which would support the additional functionality without completely gutting the module.

[dmfenton]

I'm using the spatial operations in Winnow. Very useful for me. It would be nice not to have to instantiate primitives to do the spatial operations so I'd support pulling those out. But I'm not sure how valuable Terraformer is without these things.

[jgravois]

@JerrySievert i feel that if we took those away, it would make terraformer unusable.

@dmfenton I'm not sure how valuable Terraformer is without these things.

since we assist with conversion to geojson, isn't it as easy as mixing and matching with Turf.js?

its my impression that the most heavily used parts of Terraformer have always been the conversion tools. my only intention is to whittle down the surface area of the project to what gets the most use and something that would be more manageable for me to oversee personally (working under the assumption that otherwise it would be more or less unmaintained).

i definitely don't want to make any changes that would make the project less useful so i'm happy to receive the feedback.

[JerrySievert]

i feel that if we moved it to its own organization, and opened up the membership a bit, we'd get a little more traction with maintenance.

[dmfenton]

since we assist with conversion to geojson, isn't it as easy as mixing and matching with Turf.js?

No Turf does not have the same spatial predicates within, intersects, contains. It has some similar functionality where you could probably make those predicates work, but it relies on JSTS, which is slower than Terraform in my testing.

[JerrySievert]

@dmfenton i'm glad to hear that terraformer is faster, we spent a lot of time trying to optimize

[patrickarlt]

I think the best thing to do would be to:

1. Move Terraformer to it's own org, a la Koop
2. Split up the main Terraformer Package into
   • terraformer-arcgis - the ArcGIS parser
   • terraformer-wkt - The WKT parser
   • terraformer-spatial - within, intersects, contains, bbox, convex hull, mercator/geographic conversion ect... pretty much everything in the Terraformer.Tools namespace plus within, intersects and contains convenience methods
3. Deprecate all Terraformer.Primitive stuff
4. Deprecate Terraformer.GeoStore stuff

[JerrySievert]

i'm ok with (1) and (2), let's discuss (3), and fine with (4).

when do we want to move it all into its own org? i'm excited to get this project active again (and have a team that can help).

[patrickarlt]

Since (3) seems to be the only thing that merits discussion I'll give my stance on it.

From an API design standpoint turning JSON objects (GeoJSON) into JavaScript Objects (Terraformer Primitives) is a huge pain like @dmfenton mentioned. The only real benefit is some convenience when calling utility methods like thing.within(otherThing) as opposed to within(thing, otherThing).

The main cost of Primitives and why I spun the ArcGIS parser out into its own repo is that in browsers using Primitives was simply a lot of extra dependency I didn't use.

If anyone is really interested in keeping primitives I am game but I think the core promise of Terraformer should be to work with GeoJSON not its own base object types. So the new terraformer-arcgis, terraformer-wkt and terraformer-spatial should all work with GeoJSON and if we want we could make a terraformer-primitive that simply curries all their functionality into a nice object.