[LUCENE-3610] Revamp spatial APIs that use primitives (or arrays of primitives) in their args/results so that they use strongly typed objects

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: modules/spatial
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Chris M. Hostetter
• Created: 29/Nov/11 22:58
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 13:02

Description

My "spatial awareness" is pretty meek, but LUCENE-3599 seems like a prime example of the types of mistakes that are probably really easy to make with all of the Spatial related APIs that deal with arrays (or sequences) of doubles where specific indexes of those arrays (or sequences) have significant meaning: mainly latitude vs longitude.

We should probably reconsider any method that takes in double[] or multiple doubles to express latlon pairs and rewrite them to use the existing LatLng class – or if people think that class is too heavyweight, then add a new lightweight class to handle the strong typing of a basic latlon point instead of just passing around a double[2] or two doubles called "x" and "y" ...

public static final class SimpleLatLonPointInRadians {
  public double latitude;
  public double longitude;
}

...then all those various methods that expect lat+lon pairs in radians (like DistanceUtils.haversine, DistanceUtils.normLat, DistanceUtils.normLng, DistanceUtils.pointOnBearing, DistanceUtils.latLonCorner, etc...) can start having APIs that don't make your eyes bleed when you start trying to understand what order the args go in.