[Featureserver] what is the status?

[christopher.schmidt at nokia.com]

On Nov 15, 2010, at 12:48 PM, ext Wendell Turner wrote:

> What is the status of featureserver?
> 
> It looks interesting, but I don't see much activity on the
> mailing list.  Is it still supported?  The source code is
> all dated 2008-05-06.  The OpenLayers demos don't work (they
> get 'Unhandled request return Not found'). 

The OpenLayers demos were never really well-maintained, but the
FeatureServer code -- that is, a simple server which can take
in REST-based queries with data and can serve it back -- is reasonable.
The reason that there hasn't been a new release is because the
'2.x' branch, which added a bunch of new features that I liked more,
was never something I really felt comfortable forcing people to make
a 'leap' in the source code for people who were actively using the previous
release. 

The core of the code -- specifically, the vectorformats code that allows
you to read and write multiple formats -- is still actively supported
and maintained, and I regularly encourage people to use it, especially
in Django/other PYthon based frameworks.

For a more active development effort, the MapFish server is another
interesting thing which was originally (I believe) inspired in part
by FeatureServer.

The actual "HTTP/URL handling" bits are less interesting to me these
days than the ability to quickly and easily integrate reading and writing
of many formats into projects for use iwth APIs and the like, which iswhy
I primarily use vectorformats 
  http://svn.osgeo.org/featureserver/trunk/vectorformats/

alongside Django.

-- Chris

> Has featureserver evolved into something else?  Is
> featureserver similar to simplegeo?