CodeHaus Migration

It with heavy hearts (and a small bit of panic) that we bid adieu to CodeHaus. After many years of service CodeHaus is shutting down. A bit of last moment sponsorship from sonarqube is holding the doors open giving us a chance to migrate in an orderly fashion.

This blog post is a public notice that the GeoTools project will require assistance during this migration due to the short time frames involved.

GeoTools will lock down changes to the issue tracker after the scheduled March 18th release of GeoTools 13.0.

Migration Plan

In this weeks community meeting we have set on a migration strategy.

• Migrate GeoTools issue tracker to a new instance Jira (sorting out host options see below). This is primarily so we can manage large attachments (such as test data) that make our issue tracker valuable. As a fallback plan we will consider migration to github issues.
• Migrate GeoTools wiki to github wiki with a focus on proposals and project history.

Similar arrangements are being made for our friends with the GeoServer (OSGeo), uDig (LocationTech) and GeoAPI (OGC) projects. If you are in position to assist these projects please contact the appropriate development list as they could use a hand.

Due to a technical limitation (the use of a single sign on system) we cannot just take a backup and restore on a new system. This leaves us with two options: Use REST API and a script to migrate to a new system, or assemble a work party to transfer issues via CSV export (and grab the attachments one at a time).

Thus far we have contacted:

• The OSGeo board has offered their support in todays meeting for both setting up hosting and requesting a proposal for data transfer via REST API.
• The OSGeo system administration committee are looking into options for hosting.
  Thanks to both Harrison Grundy and Alex Mandel for helping refine migration requirements on IRC.
• Both GeoSolutions and Boundless have offered assistance
• We have reached out to Atlassian about cloud hosting

Thank you to the above groups for their prompt assistance.

About CodeHaus

CodeHaus has been an amazing resource for our open source community, offering friendly hands on support in the face of the growing pains experienced with SourceForge. We should also thank Atlassian for making their software (Jira and Confluence) available to open source projects on CodeHaus.

GeoTools FOSS4G 2011

GeoTools had a great showing at the recent FOSS4G Conference (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) which was held in Denver last month. Presentations at the conference highlighted how the hard work of the GeoTools developers is paying off in terms of the wide adoption of the library, and its use in some amazing applications.

There were a number of talks directly on GeoTools this year:

• Raster data in GeoServer and GeoTools: Achievements, issues and future developments (GeoSolutions) slideshare
• Status of GeoTools (GeoSolutions,LISAsoft,OpenGeo) slideshare

GeoServer as always provides an excellent example of GeoTools in action:

• The State of GeoServer (GeoSolutions,OpenGeo) slideshare
• GeoServer on steroids (GeoSolutions)
• The status of GeoServer WPS (GeoSolutions)
• Advanced cartographic map rendering in GeoServer (GeoSolutions)
• Web Mapping with GeoServer (OpenGeo)
• Practical use of GeoServer & SLD for WMS (GISassistANS AB)
• Integration of GeoServer with NoSQL databases (Data Tactics Corp)
• Mapnik2GeoTools (OpenGeo)

These presentations are a great way to see what is possible with GeoTools. Often it is easier to understand the capabilities of the library by seeing it in use, and both the State of GeoServer and Advanced cartographic map rendering presentations are excellent examples of this.

A special mention to GeoScript which is building a bridge between GeoTools functionality and a range of scripting languages, with the emphasis on providing a concise and simple API:

• GeoScript - Spatial Capabilities for Scripting Languages GeoScript.ppt slideshare(OpenGeo)
• Working with GeoScript (OpenGeo)
• Scripting GeoServer with GeoScript (OpenGeo) slideshare

Geomajas had a strong showing this year with several presentations plus a hands-on workshop:

• Introduction to Geomajas (Geosparc)
• Geomajas, a GIS framework for the web(Geosparc)
• Mobile GIS through Geomajas(Geosparc)
• Securing GIS data(Geosparc)

We are hoping to attract more direct participation of Geomajas developers in the GeoTools project (for now we just have a welcome page).

Did I miss you project in this roll call? Contribute a welcome page to the GeoTools User Guide in order to be included in promotional activities!

GeoTools Codesprint

Finally a big thanks to those taking part in the GeoTools code sprint!

• Looked into why sorting is turned off for MemoryDataStore!
• Put together a Process Tutorial (OctagonalEnvelope in 5 lines!)
• A couple great volunteers (shown below) updated the Eclipse Quickstart to work with the included copy of Maven
• Looked into Neo4j - but got stuck on AGPL license (grrr!)