A colleague from the University of Kassel here in Germany recently sent me a quite big and irregularly shaped SHP file coverage containing many small holes and irregular formations. He had tried to buffer the shapes using the complete product line of a leading GIS software company, but each attempt failed due to the program running out of memory or other mistakes relating to building the buffers. Even sending the file to this other GIS software company's developer team for troubleshooting was not successful. The other company only sent him a quite complicated workaround which would mean a lot of time expensive manual work. There was no solution or suggestion of further automatic procedures to generate the desired buffer.
I offered to help my colleague by attempting to perform the same operation using the TatukGIS Developer Kernel. I wrote about twenty lines with the DK to create a buffer application and, after calculating more than 12 hours (despite running the operation in memory, which might give you an impression of the complexity of the coverage) the result delivered by the DK was simply perfect.
You have done a great work with the DK.
Dr. Dirk Lorenzen
Ecology Centre, Dept. of Landscape Ecology
University of Kiel
Germany
www.ecology.uni-kiel.de