Re: Spatial relationships between geometries

[Peter Yuill]

Most spatial databases have a concept of primary (index based) and secondary (non index based) filters for spatial queries. MySQL has just implemented the primary side at this stage, so you will need to do the secondary filtering in code. Java offers you a couple of good options.
If you have it all working except for the secondary filtering your best bet is probably to use JTS (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jts-topo-suite) to create a geometry for the zone and intersect it with geometries you select from the database using your MBR query. JTS has rigorous implementations of all common spatial predicates, including intersects. It also has IO classes to construct geometry from WKT.
The other good option is to use Geotools (http://sourceforge.net/projects/geotools). It offers a vast array of spatial functionality including rendering, reprojection, meta data and of course data access to a wide range of sources including MySQL (with secondary filtering built in).