[postgis-users] A bit off topic, but FOSS GIS clients...

[dnrg]

This is off-topic. But since many use
PostGIS/PostgreSQL as a spatial database backend, I
thought people here may be best equipped to comment. I
couldn't be the only one wondering about this.

Quantum GIS is painfully slow rendering and searching
through data in moderately sized, and evidently even
tiny, shapefiles. That's *with* scale-dependent
display set to reasonable values.

Seems QGIS is a decade or more behind even ArcView 3.2
(still a great product after all these years) with
regard to performance and basic (non-OGC and web)
functionality.

Will importing the shapefiles into PostgreSQL solve
the data access speed issues? Is the rendering engine
itself problematic, or is the slowness a function of
its inability to work efficiently with shapefiles?

I find QGIS simply unusable when working with
shapefiles. Considering many GIS novices still work
with shapefiles, I'm guessing the lack of
an efficient FOSS GIS client will stall wider adoption
of FOSS GIS.

Am I mistaken, or is FOSS GIS weakest when it comes to
the non-web based GIS client arena?

I seriously want to like QGIS, but am having a tough
time of that presently. Are there other FOSS GIS
clients that can access, search through, and render
shapefile data better than QGIS? I'm presuming,
perhaps falsely, that uDig is no better in
non-RDBMS-based spatial data access/render
performance.

Finally, have the QGIS, uDig, and other folks
considered joining forces to create a killer GIS
client? I find it depressing to see many different
fiefdoms in the FOSS community generally. If several
projects merged, it could lead to one heck of a FOSS
software product rather than, perhaps, several
marginal ones.

One of the beauties of FOSS is that anyone with a
vision can start a project and attempt to create
something better than already exists. However, that
vision may be realized, if ever, at a glacial pace. I
myself am impatient, and am not a software developer.
But if I was a developer, I would want to find the
best FOSS GIS client out there and focus efforts on
it.

Seems to me if people joined forces more often and
consolidated projects, QGIS, for instance, might not
still be choking trying to access, search, and render
moderately sized shapefiles after 5 years of
development.

So what gives? At conferences like FOSS4G, is there
ever talk of project consolidation? If not, why not? I
tend to think of all the development hours spent on,
say, 8 FOSS GIS clients, wasted, when, if
there was focus, 1 or 2 FOSS GIS clients could really
kick some butt and give commercial products real
competition.

Why doesn't project consolidation happen often--or not
often enough? Hurt feelings? Unwillingness to judge
one product over another?

Have there been no systematic attempts by the
community to seriously assess what projects are out
there, find 1 or 2 best of breeds, then encourage the
focus of development on those?

I appreciate all the work that's been done on QGIS,
uDig, and others. But I personally would love to see
more consolidation so we make larger, quicker strides.

Final question--if I import large shapefiles into
PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and use QGIS or uDig, will my
speed  and usability gripes be extinguished? Honestly
can't ever imagine using the latest QGIS with
shapefiles for more than 10 minutes without wanting
immediately to uninstall it.



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