Alessandro Furieri has announced the SpatiaLite Cookbook, an excellent guide to SpatiaLite with many practical examples, optimisation tips and information on using SpatiaLite with different programming languages. You can check it out here.
Frank Warmerdam has announced that OSGeo4W is moving to the recently released GDAL 1.8.0. Instead of GDAL 1.5.4, the default version will be 1.8.0, additional packages like gdal-python, gdal-autotest, gdal-ecw etc. will also be updated or removed if no longer needed.
For compatibility with some packages that still require GDAL 1.5.4, a new package gdal15dll (with the necessary libraries) will be added. This package will be automatically installed if needed.
Since the transition to a new version of GDAL is a rather laborious and time-consuming process, the update of some packages included in OSGeo4W is temporarily suspended. In particular, this affects QGIS nightly builds.
The maintainers of the QGIS OSGeo4W package have already announced that they will rebuild the package with GDAL 1.8.0 as soon as possible, GRASS will be rebuilt after GRASS 6.4.1 is released.
I have created an OSGeo4W-compatible QGIS package from the raster-providers branch (r15015) and uploaded it to the forum. As the name suggests, developers in this branch are working on optimising raster providers; in particular, one of the results will be support for on-the-fly raster reprojection (already available for the GDAL provider).
QGIS has been built with GRASS and Python support and uses GDAL 1.7.3 (all dependencies are from OSGeo4W). To use it:
install QGIS and all its dependencies using the OSGeo4W installer
download the package from the forum thread
extract the contents of the package to the OSGeo4W root directory (by default this is C:\OSGeo4W)
Nathan has published an interesting video showing 8 years of QGIS development.
The video was created using Gource, detailed explanations of the process can be found on Nathan’s blog. Each cluster of files represents a directory, and branches show the directory hierarchy of the source code.
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.
