[OSGeo-Announce] OSGeo Code Sprint 2014 in Vienna - A great success!

[Anne Ghisla]

In the week from March 24 to 28 more than 60 developers from over 18
projects gathered for the OSGeo Code Sprint 2014 in the rooms
generously provided by the City of Vienna (MA 14). Improvements of and
new features for the individual projects were decided and implemented
in direct personal communication among the relevant developers. A very
important core element of free and open source software development is
the active exchange and the direct collaboration of the individual
projects and initiatives.

Vector tiles are one of the current hot topics among the whole
community that have been extensively discussed at the Code Sprint. A
specification draft has been prepared and will be discussed further.

The following paragraphs provide some highlights and achievements of the
various participating projects during the Code Sprint.

With 210 updates in the code base during the Code Sprint the
international [GRASS GIS](http://grass.osgeo.org) development team has
released the new version 7 after 6 years of development. The free
software package provides novel methods to process, analyze, and
visualize geographic data and runs on all major platforms (MS Windows,
Apple, Linux, BSD) and architectures (x86, amd64, arm) from laptops to
mainframes.

The [QGIS project](http://www.qgis.org) took care of bug resolving,
discussed future new features, updated and simplified the management of
plugins which can be generated and freely provided by users. Together
with the GRASS GIS project the integration of version 7 in QGIS has
been prepared.

The [MapServer](http://mapserver.org) team decided on the release plan
for the upcoming 7.0 release, worked on easier processes for
documentation translations, and resolved several smaller issues with
respect to coverty scans, dateline crossing data, pixel is point vs.
pixel is area, UTF-grid, etc.

A proposal was made or maybe better an experiment undertaken to
harmonize the data models of [GDAL](http://gdal.org) and
[OGR](http://gdal.org/ogr/index.html). Considerable work went into scala
bindings for GDAL.

The [PostGIS](http://postgis.org) team succeeded to close all remaining
tickets for the 2.1.2 and 2.0.5 releases and releasing them. Very
interesting work started on 3D exports using
[three.js](http://threejs.org).

[OpenLayers 3](http://ol3js.org) is a comprehensive rewrite of a well
established library for displaying and interacting with geospatial data
on the web. The new version is currently in pre-release beta state.
During the sprint, the documentation system was improved to include
documentation of the events that the library emits. Work on feature
clustering to unclutter a map with too many point features was started,
and a demo of displaying HiDPI (Retina) tiles from the [Austrian
basemap](http://basemap.at) was created. The inter-project discussion
about creating a common transport format for vector tiles will benefit
the project in the near future.

[pycsw](http://pycsw.org) finished packaging for version 1.8 and worked
on OSGeo project incubation.

In order to find and exploit synergies in functionality and technology
the projects [EOxServer](http://eoxserver.org) and
[GeoNode](http://geonode.org) started a closer collaboration at the
Code Sprint.

Various other projects have also been present and active at the Code
Sprint like [PDAL](http://pdal.io),
[ZOO-Project](http://www.zoo-project.org),
[MapMint](http://www.mapmint.com), etc.

A great result for the local community in Vienna and Austria is the
start of [regular OSGeo/FOSSGIS
meetups](http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/Stammtisch_Wien).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/announce/attachments/20140408/73b26b0c/attachment.pgp>