Future direction

[Bernhard Reiter]

A happy new year Frank and Angus,

here my 0.02 Euro, a little late as usual because I moved back to
Germany.

On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 05:17:45PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Angus Carr wrote:
> > Based on one day's return comments, people on this list see the
> > "arcviewization" of GRASS as a good possible thing.

> I am not sure describing it as the arcviewization of GRASS is the
> best way to develop support for your idea. :-)

I agree with Frank here. 
For various reasons, arcview in not the goal I see.

The tale is that a good programmer knows, when to start over again and
put code aside. GRASS is a very useful and rich GIS tool, but I cannot
see how it will ever be a simple mapping and visualisation tool.

Or to put it in another way: To develop a new software package will
need less effort than to extend GRASS to reach the same (GUI) power.


Frank makes a couple of points I agree with.

> My personal opinion is that GRASS needs a friendly data viewing environment
> more than it needs a friendly interface to the analysis commands.  By this
> I mean a relatively simple GUI in which you can load various layers of
> raster and vector data, browse around, select objects and inspect attributes.

The free software world needs it. ;-)

> I can see a few major decisions to make:
> 
>  o What language to implement it in?  

>    I don't feel the viewer should be implemented in Tcl.
I agree.
>    My normal bias would be to implement it in C, or now days C++. 

Let my throw python in the round.  C would work, but C++ is a nasty
language, I saw a couple of free software projects die or suffer, 
because of the C++ choice.
As extension languages are scheme (guile) and python state of the art.

>  o What GUI toolkit to use?  
Only a a free cross platform GUI I think.

That eliminates X11, gtk and Qt.
WxWindows, fltk and fox still look good.

(wxWindows runs with native GUI toolskits, like gtk on X11 or MFC on
Windows.)


>  o How closely is it related to the existing GRASS driver technology?
>  Does it attempt to maintain some level of compatibility with the
>  existing GRASS display driver approach?  
We'd better say no here.

>  o How closely does it relate to the existing GRASS data model?  

Again, the GRASS model looks a bit like a cage to me to actually
implement an interactive geographic information viewer.
That is why I favour the redesign and reimplementation.

>  o What sort of commandline interface would be available?  
> I think Tcl would be
>    a reasonable choice for an extention language.  

Resaonable, maybe, but I see a clear trend towards python and guile or
scheme. (perl still is used, too)
The extension usually is done through exposure of object interfaces.
(Buzzwords: CORBA, COM, SOAP.)

> The biggest question is how would such a project be resourced?  

Like any free software project, hopefully.
Through a lot of contribution and nice useful code.
Programmers would be paided by different companies to provide solutions.

> One final note, I mentioned that I think it should be built on multi-format
> vector and raster libraries.  This is my area of interest, and I would be 
> willing to do substantial work to make my raster and vector multi-format read/
> write libraries available, and tailoring them to the needs of such a viewer. 

True and you already started to work on it.
I am a bit surprised that you did not mention the freegis.org
project.

Our goal certainly is to promote and bundle free software gis/mapping
efforts. We even might start developing such a simple data viewer.
We hope that we can use it in a project and therefore fund developments.

	Bernhard
-- 
Research Assistant, Geog Dept UM-Milwaukee, USA.  (www.uwm.edu/~bernhard)
Free Software Projects and Consulting 		         (intevation.net)  
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure            (ffii.org)
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