| Re: [udig-devel] questions about uDig 1.0 |
Emilio Mayorga wrote:
I've been watching this project for a while, browsing the list and scanning the Milestone reports. It looks very promising. I was going to download and install uDig today for the first time, to give it a spin, but the codehaus site seems to be down.
Yeah I just figured that out myself - we are going to try and set up a more normal site for general use (and leave codehaus for hard core RnD work with the other open source projects).
But on to more important things - http://udig.refractions.net/downloads/ contains the files you are looking for: - http://udig.refractions.net/downloads/udig0.8.RC1.exe is especially nice (even though it is only a release candidate) - http://udig.refractions.net/downloads/uDig0.7.0.exe is the last stable release
Together with a group of biologists in Nicaragua, we're putting together a project in "biodiversity informatics". It boils down to managing their biodiversity data, providing tools for analysis, and connecting them to global networks. I'm meeting with them and a likely funding source in three weeks. I'm the IT coordinator for this project. GIS is one component. I have to make a recommendation as to what GIS desktop software and other tools to use. As I see it, the choice will be between asking for ArcView (3.3 or 9) license donations from ESRI, or open source software (uDig, gvSIG, JUMP, QGIS, ...). I like what I see in uDig. So, I have a few questions about 1.0:- What minimum hardware requirements do you anticipate? I know, that's a fuzzy question and you're not there yet. Can you guesstimate how it will compare with ArcMap 9.0?
I don't have the hardware requirements for ArcMap on hand, perhaps you can share them. We have paid special attention to memory use in constructing uDig (so we can scale to larger data sets than JUMP for instance). Being a client application I would be more concerned with bandwidth then memory size.
For reference I test on a Athalon 1.7, during our testing on Friday the uDig process was using 150 megs of ram. The only time I have found uDig to be slow was a old laptop with 16 megs of shared video ram, switching to only Web Map Server layers fixed this the performance problem.
- I understand you'll be delivering a French localization. Is there any talk of a Spanish one??
Actually there has been some interest, we are going to focus on internationalization in March. Being an open source project we welcome collaboration.
- Are there plans to allow customization/scripting via languages more accessible than Java? Say, Python.
There has been talk of this, the use of the Groovy language is one of the best features of JUMP. My focus has been on making a strong, clear object model. This would support the use of the whichever scripting language to community would care to implement. (I know If I get some volunteer time I would work with Groovy myself, perhaps with a JUMP facade to allow simple scripts to inter operate).
I would like to be able to set up our project with open source software, but not at the expense of usability and ability to easily customize the software.
This is a goal we all share, I trust you have already located PostGIS, MapServer, GeoServer and so on. You may be able to ask Paul Ramsey for some papers on getting these to work together. Chris Holmes (the GeoServer lead) has started up an email list to bring some of the OGC based Services together. Things like a common configuration file fir MapServer and GeoServer have been discussed.
In short this is a very exciting time for open source GIS, or even just standards based GIS.
Cheers, Jody