This is a minor release update to Spatial4j. Spatial4j is in a maintenance mode, receiving infrequent minor changes. This release has no changes to dependencies except that some versions were updated. The minimum Java version is now 1.8.
from CHANGES.md
#197: Require Java 8, AKA v1.8. (David Smiley)
#194: Circles that cross a dateline can now be converted to a JTS Geometry. Previous attempts would throw an exception. (Stijn Caerts)
#194: JtsGeometry now supports input an Geometry that crosses the dateline multiple times (wraps the globe multiple times). Previous attempts would yield erroneous behavior. (Stijn Caerts)
#188: Upgraded to JTS 1.17.0. This JTS release has a small API change. (Jim Hughes)
#177: Improve conversion of a Circle to Shape. JtsShapeFactory allows converting from a Shape object to a JTS Geometry object. Geodetic circles now translate to a polygon that has points equidistant from the center. Before the change, there was potentially a large inaccuracy. (Hrishi Bakshi)
#163: "Empty" points in JTS are now convertible to a Spatial4j Shape instead of throwing an exception. (David Smiley)
#162: Fixed WKT & GeoJSON [de]serialization of "empty" points and geometrycollections. (Jeen Broekstra, David Smiley)
#165: Added ShapeFactory.pointLatLon convenience method. (MoeweX)
#167: WKTWriter now has a means to customize the NumberFromat. (MoeweX)
#175: ShapesAsWKTModule, a Jackson databind module, didn't deserialize WKT inside JSON to a Spatial4j Shape at all. Now it does. It continues to serialize correctly. (David Smiley)