478Shapely Geometries for Python

Shapely is to be an LGPL-licensed replacement for PCL's cartography.geometry package. Like its ancestor, it will provide familiar geometry classes with all the spatial operators of GEOS. When done, cartography.geometry can be rewritten as a lightweight layer over the new code. Additionally, Shapely will have a more Pythonic serialization story, and plug and play with other powerful Python packages using the Numpy array interface. Last, but not least, Shapely will be much easier to build, install and deploy.

Shapely serializes and deserializes using the familiar idiom from the pickle module. Here's a pickle stream example (an actual project doctest):

>>> from shapely.geometry import Point
>>> import pickle
>>> point = Point(0.0, 0.0)
>>> data = pickle.dumps(point)
>>> pp = pickle.loads(data)
>>> pp.equals(point)
True