[Qgis-developer] adding GPS tools to SEXTANTE

[Martin Dobias]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Victor Olaya <volayaf at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that it could be great to have GPS tools in SEXTANTE,
> specially to automate tasks. However, I see that it is a C++ plugin,
> not a python one. Anyone can help me and tell me how (if possible) the
> functions in that GPS plugin could be called from my python code??

Hi Victor

in my opinion the best way to proceed would be to port the basic
interfaces like GeoAlgorithm and AlgorithmProvider interfaces (and few
more auxiliary classes) to QGIS core library. Python bindings for such
c++ classes can be done quite easily. SEXTANTE then could access c++
algorithms via the same interface... GPS tools plugin would simply
register as a new provider with its algorithms. There are more c++
geoalgorithms that are worth porting to SEXTANTE framework:
- interpolation plugin
- raster terrain analysis plugin
- zonal statistics plugin
- raster calculator
- heatmap plugin
- maybe roadgraph plugin (?)

Most of the above functionality is implemented within QGIS analysis
library (without any common interfaces) and the plugins just enable
access to those algorithms.

Another solution would be to add python bindings to the existing
algorithms as they are (and that has been done already for zonal
statistics). But the first solution seems much cleaner to me.

Regards
Martin