A few days ago I wrote about the kCube Consulting initiative. The ideas have been collected, and the voting has started. Unfortunately, you can only vote for one option.
So far “Fixing bugs” is leading with 23.8%, followed by “Improving import/export on dwg/dxf” with 8.8% and “QGIS Mobile (e.g. on Android)” - 7.5%.
David DeHaan has developed a plugin and data provider for working with Sybase SQL Anywhere spatial databases in QGIS. The new functionality is available as of r14918, and the capabilities of the new provider are very similar to those of the PostGIS and SpatiaLite providers.
To build and test this provider, you will need:
download the free developer version of SQL Anywhere 12.0.0
install SQL Anywhere 12.0.0 server
install the SQL Anywhere 12.0.0 client libraries on the clients (if the server and client are on the same machine, this step is not needed)
initialise an empty database with the dbinit database_name command (replace database_name with the desired database name). This will also create a user dba with password sql
start the server with the dbsrv12 database_name command
fill the database with spatial data. For testing, you can use an SQL script that loads shapefiles from the Alaska dataset into the database. The script should be run on the server using the Interactive SQL tool (dbisql). You may need to change some variables before running the script, for example, to correct the path to the dataset (the script assumes the dataset is on the server)
start QGIS and enable the SQL Anywhere plugin. The plugin adds a button to the toolbar and creates menu items “Modules → SQL Anywhere” and “Layer → Add SQL Anywhere Layer…”
when adding a layer, a dialogue similar to the PostGIS/SpatiaLite layer dialogue will appear, where you can manage connections, get information about the database schema, configure various parameters and select geometry columns
You can find out more about SQL Anywhere’s support for spatial data here.
It would be interesting to test and compare the functionality and performance of PostGIS, SQL Anywhere and Oracle Spatial in a real-world scenario.
Tim Sutton gave a good overview of some new features in QGIS: a graphical rule editor (which helps to create rendering rules) and complex styles for vector objects (fill, outline and centre marker).
Yesterday, Martin Dobias added icon support to the QGIS plugin manager. Among other things, this will make the display of available plugins more user-friendly and make it easier to navigate through the large list. However, to take advantage of this feature, plugin authors will need to make small changes to their code (add two lines). In the future, after the launch of the new plugin repository, it is planned to add icon support to the plugin installer.
Another interesting news - kCube Consulting has decided to help the QGIS project by assigning one of their programmers to work on QGIS for 6 months. You can read more about this on Tim’s blog, and visit the wiki to check out the list of possible tasks and leave your own suggestions.
/me put on “Sax & Sex” and began to add icon support to his plugins and those he could reach.
I decided to improve my MergeShapes plugin a bit. I added encoding selection when opening files, shapefile geometry type selection and reworked the merge algorithm. Now, the final attribute table contains all unique fields from all input files, which means you can merge files with different attribute tables. The only missing bit is a setting for the default encoding of input data.
There are plans to improve DPSimplify, Statist and RasterCalc, but I don’t know how it will go yet.
I’ve also started to slowly learn Git, or rather to organise and deepen my fragmentary knowledge. I want to try out this VCS in real tasks, as there is already a Git mirror of the main QGIS SVN repository.
Today, Marco Hugentobler added the raster calculator code to the QGIS r14442. The new feature will probably be available in the next nightly build (qgis-dev) in OSGeo4W.
By the way, QGIS 1.6.0 code freeze is scheduled for later this week.
Last night, I submitted a patch to add SetIgnored support to the SQLite driver. Literally an hour later, it was applied. This means that the two most important drivers have already been made to work faster.
