[gdal-dev] KMZ Support in OGR?

[Simon Perkins]

Well, all very salient points. I particularly liked the link to Joel 
Spolsky's article. Should be required reading for all programmers!

But a couple of comments anyway...

> *) Google's libkml is not yet production ready
>   
Fair enough - I haven't used it. But my hope would be that if Google is 
going to be using this in Google Earth then it should get up to speed 
pretty darn quickly. Of course, I'm not sure they've said that...

> *) Once the KML 2.2 spec is approved by OGC I expect it to be rather
> stable, so I'm not sure that switching to libkml for an evolving
> standard is really going to buy OGR much.
>   

Another good point. To be honest my interest is more in seeing the few 
flaws I've discovered fixed than anything else. If it's easier to fix 
the current driver then that's probably the way to go.

> *) It would probably be trivial to add kmz support, but as Brian
> suggested why not just pipe the file to a zip command?
>   

Well, that's fine if you're just trying to lash something together 
specifically for KML files on a linux system, but not so great if you're 
developing, say, commercial windows software that has to deal with lots 
of different formats. As I see it the whole point of an abstraction 
layer like GDAL/OGR is that you shouldn't have to care about the 
intricacies of particular data formats. So if your users are going to be 
trying to load KMZ files (the Google Earth default format) into your 
application, it would be much nicer if OGR could just do its job and 
read those files without you having to special case things. No?


Sy


> -----Original Message-----
> From: gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
> [mailto:gdal-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Simon Perkins
> Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 12:16
> To: Brian Hamlin
> Cc: gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [gdal-dev] KMZ Support in OGR?
>
> Brian Hamlin wrote:
>   
>> <flame>You say you think it would be a great idea to add a new library
>>     
>
>   
>> in place of most of the driver that is there, but dont have time 
>> and/or ability to make a wiki page about that as a proposed 
>> project?</flame>
>>     
>
> Well, that at least is one thing I have the time to fix... I've added an
>
> enhanced KML driver using the Google library to the GDAL SoC ideas page.
>
> Feel free to edit!
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SummerOfCode
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon
>
> _______________________________________________
> gdal-dev mailing list
> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
>
>
>   

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/attachments/20080329/1be7ab63/attachment.html