QGIS hackfest 2013 (Brighton)

26.09.2013 14:39 ·  GIS  ·  qgis, meetings

The 10th QGIS developer meeting in Brighton (UK) has come to an end. This meeting was the most attended ever. This can be explained by the growing popularity of QGIS and the fact that the hackfest was held just before the FOSS4G conference.

The first day was almost unremarkable, with participants gradually arriving at the University of Sussex, newcomers getting to know each other — in short, an ordinary day before the hackfest itself. Among the notable changes to the code during the day:

• copy/paste support for rendering rules
• ELSE branch support in rule-based renderer
• improvements in the print composer menus

Meanwhile, at Gatwick Airport, Victor Olaya is starting a complete refactoring of the Processing framework…

The QGIS developers are not superstitious people, and Friday the 13th did not affect their work in any way. The list of commits is impressive:

• the Plugin Manager got the ability to optionally hide deprecated plugins, as well as highlight them in the plugin list
• implemented visualisation of topological information in GRASS layers
• Processing framework got a new, more convenient, configuration dialogue
• 10 new algorithms were added to Processing
• and others improvements and bug fixes

There were also several discussions, starting with Richard talking about the new website. This was followed by discussions about refactoring the vector API, support for attribute domains, the possibility of using QML (especially in QGIS Android), the architecture and further development of the Processing framework.

On Saturday, Victor pushed to master the first set of refactoring commits

It’s starting to get fun… now nothing works :-)

Despite the refactoring, the framework continues to grow in functionality: 5 new algorithms have been added, and a few old ones have been improved. The Python console gets support for custom colour schemes (aesthetes will be pleased). There were also several discussions: a unified configuration dialogue, 3D support (Globe plugin, PostGIS, etc.), plugin manager and repository, further development of the WMS client, QGIS Server, QGIS WebClient.

Sunday, the penultimate full day of the hackfest. Another series of discussions, this time on documentation, the abstraction layer for databases, and attribute/geometry indexing. Quite a few commits were also made:

• new script editor for Processing
• reduced number of data conversions when running SAGA algorithms in QGIS
• obsolete settings and related code were removed from Processing
• added the ability to save models created in the Graphical Modeler as an image
• expressions support in “Graduated” and “Unique values” symbology

Photos from the hackfest and visualisation of developers activity.