[QGIS-Developer] QGIS Server and the Grants programme

Tue Jun 9 03:07:13 PDT 2020

Hi Nyall, 

Thanks for clarifying - I am relieved by your further statements ;-) 

I don't know a good replacement of ArcGIS Server portal (or whatever
that product is called currently). I agree that it would be great if
there would be a good replacement for that - and that would need further
funding - and perhaps a good collaboration between more than one of the
OSGEO/QGIS developer companies. I fear that any of the available
OSGeo/QGIS companies on it's own is too small to cover that fully. It
probably needs something larger on top of it, with the smaller already
existing companies bringing in their individual expertise to that larger
entity. QGIS cloud from Sourepole was a good start some years ago, but
it would have to grow faster than it currently does, and that would
require a larger entity than Sourcepole (or most other similar
companies) are. And of course also more paying customers. 

The building blocks are mostly there, yes. 

Andreas 

On 2020-06-09 11:45, Nyall Dawson wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 09:18, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote: 
> On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 09:12, Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com> wrote: 
> Hi
> 
> Nice, thoughtful message below, thanks Jonathon. I wonder what it will take to move the needle above 1%? And whether we should try to use our funds to make that happen. QGIS is surely the most expressive way to do cartography of any GIS out there (acknowledging total bias on my part) and seeing that cartography on the web would surely please many people. Clients like QWC, QWC2 or anything that requires you to hand edit a config file or log into a unix shell to publish map services are probably the main limitation (no offence to those tools). Also the lack of an built in tiling server (with proper metalling and meta buffering) must surely be the other.  Maybe a more useful approach to your discussion below would be to promote funding the elements that add resistance to deploying QGIS server……but then we would be in new feature space and circling back to the idea of not funding QGIS Server with grants….. 
> Something else to consider is whether technologies like WMS are
> ultimately just "dead end" technologies now, and possibly we'd be
> better off focusing on client side rendering of vector features from a
> server (QGIS or other), and providing a library which can do
> client-side rendering of vector tiles from QGIS symbology in as close
> to 1:1 as possible...

Re-reading my message, I think it comes across unintentionally
critical. I was actually just "pondering aloud"!

I definitely agree that there's a strong use case for a server
component which "just works" with QGIS, and I would hate to see this
efforts abandoned. Indeed, my personal opinion is that what osgeo is
really lacking is a unified solution to desktop/web/mobile. We have
all the raw building blocks, but there's just no direct equivalent of
ArcGIS portal where end users can easily publish datasets and maps.
Boundless was filling this gap with their offerings, but that's a
thing of the past now, and no-one has really stepped up to fill this
need. Possibly geonode + QGIS server backend is the closest we get,
but that's still needing significant investment before it's a really
compelling competitor.

I'd really love to hear what solutions others deploy when they're
asked by a client to replace an ArcGIS desktop + Portal environment.
Perhaps there's actually a need for **more** investment in QGIS server
to fund development of a Portal style geo-cms, tightly integrated with
QGIS desktop (and QField/Input)*.

Nyall

* minus the completely broken-by-design security and data management
models used by Portal

> Nyall
> 
>> Regards
>> 
>> Tim
>> 
>> On 8 Jun 2020, at 21:42, Jonathan Moules <jonathan-lists at lightpear.com> 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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>> --
>> 
>> Tim Sutton
>> 
>> Co-founder: Kartoza
>> Ex Project chair: QGIS.org
>> 
>> Visit http://kartoza.com to find out about open source:
>> 
>> Desktop GIS programming services
>> Geospatial web development
>> GIS Training
>> Consulting Services
>> 
>> Skype: timlinux
>> IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
>> 
>> I'd love to connect. Here's my calendar link to make finding time easy.
>> 
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