[Qgis-developer] [QGIS Server] Maintain it and create a team

[Nikolai Bezdna]

Hi QGIS Server devs,

I’m using QGIS server and find it quite convenient, since I can author map projects with powerful QGIS gui and get them published as OGC services right on-the-fly. I don’t think any other FOSS OGC servers out there can boast the same functionality. I’m not a QGIS Server committer, but I’d be happy to help testing new versions and providing feedback - like testing master builds and reporting bugs, regressions, etc.

One thought about the future improvements: most webmaps and GIS software utilise vector tiles now and Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT), recently adopted by ESRI, really became a de-facto standard. But unfortunately QGIS Server lacks implementation of vector tile creation and serving.
While QGIS has bleeding-edge desktop functionality, QGIS Server sadly stays behind progress here. IMHO adopting vector tiles (reading and most importantly creation) should be one of top priorities for future versions.
I know QGIS depends on GDAL mostly in terms of I/O, so it really should be solved on both GDAL and QGIS levels. But as far as I know GDAL dev community doesn’t have any particular plans to implement MVT driver (or, perhaps, they do?:).
Some work is going on the postgis side (https://gist.github.com/bjornharrtell/7f4b6c030d4faa63f99b1ceb6f3edcef <https://gist.github.com/bjornharrtell/7f4b6c030d4faa63f99b1ceb6f3edcef>).

Cheers,
Nick Lebedev

> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2016 14:45:37 +0200
> From: René-Luc Dhont <rldhont at gmail.com>
> To: qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: [Qgis-developer] [QGIS Server] Maintain it and create a team
> Message-ID: <25bba341-9db8-40eb-7bda-8918c76f72a7 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> 
> Hi devs,
> 
> The Qt4 and Python 2.7 is going away from QGIS master, following this PR:
> Require python 3 and qt5 https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3510
> 
> But a part of the project directly suffered of this: QGIS Server. As 
> explain on the Pull Request 'Require python 3 and qt5', all the QGIS 
> Server tests has been disabled. This means that QGIS Server is not 
> maintained with automatic tests for QGIS 3.
> 
> So Mathias Khun has opened an issue about QGIS 3 API to remove QGIS 
> Server from QGIS master.
> https://github.com/qgis/qgis3.0_api/issues/63
> The discussion is opened but I don't know if all the developpers are 
> aware of this.
> 
> For our team, 3Liz (Michaël, David and I), the QGIS Server is a big part 
> of the QGIS project and it will really be a pitty if it disappears. A 
> part of the QGIS users are interesting in it because they can published 
> web services directly from their work. So QGIS Server is a reason for 
> them to use QGIS. Many users like the part of using QGIS desktop to 
> configure easily many options for publication, and use WMS, WFS, WCS and 
> event WPS with different clients (one of them is Lizmap).
> We take much time (and about half of it without funds) to keep this 
> feature alive and up to date with QGIS improvements, and are willing to 
> continue down this path (we believe in it and have many good feedbacks 
> from users)
> 
> We would like to raise interest around QGIS Server, and report here that 
> this part of QGIS is really used in production by companies and research 
> centers, and maintained by some devs, and not just a QGIS side project 
> "for fun".
> 
> We just discussed with Alessandro Pasotti and we would like to create a 
> team to maintain and discuss about the evolution of QGIS Server. We 
> would like to use this opportunity to improve QGIS Server and make it 
> more maintainable and granular.
> 
> Some questions to gather reactions :
> * Who is interested in maintaining QGIS Server ?
> * Who is interested in participating in  QGIS Server (code, ideas, 
> review, tests) ?
> * Please share any ideas to enhance (refactor) QGIS Server
> 
> Regards,
> René-Luc D'Hont
> 
> 
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