[Pywps-dev] PyWPS 4 poster at FOSS4G Europe

[Luís de Sousa]

Dear all,

LIST agreed to fund my participation at this year's FOSS4G-E if I
could present something there. As it happens, the organisers accepted
an over-time poster on PyWPS 4. The abstract for this poster is
attached, feedback is welcome.

Anyone else planning to attend?

Regards,

Luís
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PyWPS 4 - The new Python implementation of the Web Processing Standard 1.0 and 2.0
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PyWPS is an open source, light-weight implementation of the Web Processing Service (WPS) standard, issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It allows users to code geo-spatial analysis processes in the Python programming language and publish them over the internet through a CGI server such as Apache. The option for the Python language makes the usage of geo-processing libraries such as GRASS seamless and very easy to learn.

The development of PyWPS started almost a decade ago, its general philosophy and the tools on which it relies are starting to appear dated today. The new release of PyWPS (version 4) is a complete re-write of the code, taking advantage of modern libraries and tools.  PyWPS 4 uses the Werkzeug utility library to expose users processes to the internet through the WSGI 1.0 standard. PyWPS 4 also relies on Flask, a light-weight  web application framework, for the core its HTTP request-response processing. In this release, PyWPS is relying on the Multiprocessing library for asynchronous process execution.

At this stage PyWPS 4 is already fully compliant with version 1.0 of the WPS standard. Compliance with WPS 2.0 is targeted for the next iteration (possibly 4.1), which will require a process queuing and message passing mechanism. Each process run must be traceable and open to asynchronous messaging, in order to deal with the new requests specific by the standard: PAUSE, CANCEL and RESUME.

Even if already allows the coding of process and their exposure to the web, further goals have been set for PyWPS to augment its functionality. An administrative REST  interface is projected to facilitate the publication of new processes and eventually allow request submission. The automatic publication of Complex outputs (i.e., geo-spatial data)  using an OGC services enabled third party software (e.g. MapServer) is another goal. A further release (PyWPS 4.2) will target more advanced features such as transactional WPS.

PyWPS 4 is now undergoing a testing phase to which the community is invited to participate. The enrichment of the test suite will also attest the interoperability with other OGC services (WFS and WCS) and the integration with geo-processing tools such as GDAL/OGR or GRASS. 

With version 4 PyWPS is starting the incubation process towards accreditation as an OSGeo project.

PyWPS 4 is being developed with funding from the MUSIC Interreg IVB project and from the Google Summer of Code 2015 at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST).