Moved 'properties' up the GeoJSON class tree

[JosephCottam]

My reading of section 1 GeoJSON (http://geojson.org/geojson-spec.html#introduction) spec says that properties can be held by most any type of data. Not having the properties prevented deserialization of US counties found in the world.geo.json collection (https://github.com/johan/world.geo.json).

This pull request moves the properties dictionary up to a higher point in the class tree. It also adds an annotation to prevent serialization of the properties dictionary when there are none (thus, tests did not need to change).

[grundid]

Thanks for your pull request. Looking at the geojson spec I thought that only Features can have properties.
"Features in GeoJSON contain a geometry object and additional properties".

Could you please post the example that cannot be parsed without the properties?

[JosephCottam]

As I read the spec, you are only required to handle "properties" on a "Feature" object, but they are not forbidden elsewhere.

Cannot be parsed without properties (does not preclude the below being improper, but its one of the things I was working with): https://raw.github.com/johan/world.geo.json/master/countries/USA/AK/Aleutians%20East.geo.json

The solution I provided above specifically promotes properties up so they would still be accessible if found. An alternative would be to encode a more robust parser that generally ignores non-required items.

[grundid]

Thanks again. Your contribution will be part of release 1.1 that I'm pushing right now to maven central. It should be available for download within a few hours.