[QGIS-Developer] QGIS Server and the Grants programme

Tue Jun 9 00:38:49 PDT 2020

Hi Alessandro, 

Good idea - I would be happy to join such a meeting. 

In our case (talking for my employer), it is mainly performance,
reliability, scalability and maintenance where we would like to see
improvements. A cache that can be shared between instances would be
great to have. And perhaps a management interface where one could get a
better insight to the state of QGIS server and it's cache: what projects
are cached, how much memory do they need, ability to reload certain
projects, etc. 

Of course, there might be other aspects as well, but the above mentioned
issues are our main pain points currently. 

We would also help with some funding and I can help to attract others. 

Andreas 

On 2020-06-09 09:24, Alessandro Pasotti wrote:

> Thank you Jonathan for raising the discussion, I think this should be
> a good opportunity to focus on how we can gain a bigger "market share"
> and restart investing on the server with both time and funds.
> 
> Full disclaimer: I'm a QGIS server developer.
> 
> It would be probably useful to start a discussion about how we can
> make QGIS Server better and what makes it lag behind "competitors",
> both FOSS and proprietary.
> 
> - Is it missing features?
> - performances/scalability?
> - standard compliance?
> - missing protocols (WPS...)?
> - documentation/examples?
> - ease of deployment/maintenance?
> - security auditing?
> - plain marketing?
> 
> I've personally found exceptionally productive the QGIS Server Meeting
> we had in Lion a few years back (that ultimately led to a deep
> refactoring of the server), I think we should organize a dedicated
> (online) meeting with the interested parties to start a discussion and
> share ideas.
> 
> Regards
> 
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:09 AM Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote: 
> 
>> Hi Jonathan,
>> 
>> You keep repeating yourself. You started the exact same discussion a year ago.
>> 
>> You have a valid point, of course, I don't argue that. But if you think about small organizations  that do not have a lot of personal (or financial) resources, it would be a lot of burden to invest twice the time in styling: once for QGIS desktop and another time again for UMN mapserver and Geoserver. Even if SLD output from QGIS improved (also thanks to efforts of Andrea Aime and others), it still can't transport everything. If it would, then I would better agree with your argument.
>> 
>> For such smaller organization, speed (and I know that UMN and Geoserver are a bit faster than QGIS server) is not the only important thing - it is also their personal and financial resources and complexity of their software landscape.
>> 
>> And QGIS server has some other unique selling points: the proprietary GetPrint command that doesn't have a match in Geoserver or UMN, the ability to create Atlases from server, and who knows, in the future perhaps QGIS server can run processing models.
>> 
>> Greetings,
>> 
>> Andreas
>> 
>> On 2020-06-08 22:42, Jonathan Moules wrote:
>> 
>> Hi List,
>> Some of you may have seen my blog post on the OSGeo-Discuss list about which mapping servers are the most deployed. For those who haven't seen it, QGIS Server has about 60 public deployments (1% of all of them), and it serves 11,924 datasets (0.5% of all public geospatial WMS/WFS/WCS/WMTS datasets).
>> 
>> Potentially controversial here and I appreciate it's not a competition, but given the low uptake of QGIS Server compared to other Open Source offerings (GeoServer: 964 deployments, 963,603 datasets; MapServer: 544 deployments, 389,709 datasets), is QGIS Server something the grant program should be funding? There are three Server proposals totalling EUR10,000, 22% of the fund.
>> 
>> Now, before you get the pitchforks out(!), please consider the following:
>> 
>> * Zero sum game - Any money spent on QGIS Server cannot be spent on QGIS Desktop. (The grants mostly aren't things that will improve the shared QGIS Core). (This reasoning also follows through to OSGeo funds).
>> 
>> * Multiple solutions - Open Source (and OSGeo) already has a very healthy ecosystem of mapping servers - does it need another one?
>> 
>> * Limited number of users benefited - I don't have stats for it, but QGIS Desktop is probably the most popular Open Source Desktop GIS, and is certainly going to have many orders of magnitude more users than QGIS Server.
>> 
>> * Playing to your strengths - QGIS' strength is it's Desktop and it's generally good practice to play to your strengths.
>> 
>> So given the above, and that QGIS is already "winning" as an Open Source Desktop (great job!), I'd like to suggest it's not a good idea to dilute the limited resources by spending them on QGIS Server. Instead it seems that far more people would benefit if that money was spent on Desktop, especially the bug fixing programme.
>> 
>> Or alternatively, given the "Unique Selling Point" of QGIS Server is its integration with QGIS Desktop, those resources could be used to further improve interoperability with GeoServer/MapServer/deegree/etc. Those are all successful mature OSGeo projects that excel at serving maps, have an architecture designed for it, and already have huge install bases.
>> 
>> TLDR: QGIS excels at being a Desktop, and I'd like to suggest it should play to its strengths and focus its limited funds there to benefit the most users.
>> 
>> I shall now retreat to my bunker. :-)
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jonathan
>> 
>> Note: The above only applies to the Grant program and funding; how developers wish to spend their time, and on which projects is of course their own prerogative.
>> 
>> (Disclosure: I have no horse in this race; I don't run or administer any mapping servers, but I have done GeoServer in the past.)
>> 
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