uDig GIS: A First Look (Linux Journal)

uDig has its upsides, especially when compared with proprietary products like ArcGIS. I particularly appreciate the easy PostGIS access, which I've found very helpful for visualizing data layers which aren't yet visible on our Mapserver-based sites, or which I don't want to bother putting in a mapfile yet (or at all).

One major downside, I've found, is that it's extremely slow when loading raster data of any size. Viewing a GeoTIFF of a full Landsat scene in ArcView 3.2 is quick, whereas uDig tends to lock up badly or spin forever. This could use some work, methinks. Or it might be a Java problem. I've found that Java-based GIS programs tend to choke on large datasets, especially when compared with programs written in C.