[ZOO-PSC] FOSS4G Call for Workshop

[Gérald Fenoy]

Hi PSC members,
I started to wrote this email more than one week ago, before the FOSS4G Call for Workshop so date can sound odd today...

As you probably noticed on the foss4g2011 web site the call for workshop will open on january 15.

I would like to make you short overview of what I would like to submit as workshop (I also think about last year when some people told us that it was good to get a workshop about ZOO-Project but they would appreciate also if we made a tutorial about ZOO-Project as it is free of charge for attendees) and also shorter version as tutorial : 

  1) Introduction to WPS and its ZOO-Project implementation : why WPS is so useful and what it can do for you. It would contains an overview of what is doable using WPS specification (including parameters description and use cases) and its ZOO-Project implementation. We will mainly present here advantages of using the WPS standardized communication protocol when developing Client interfaces and what WPS is able to provide to a client in term of functionalities (storing result on the server side, execute request to run the processing as a background task, introducing chaining through the simple use of result of a process as input for another one and so on). We can also plan to make some demonstrations using the QGIS WPS Client to communicate with ZOO-Kernel as it is already working (you can see it here [1]). A small OpenLayers client can be used to display map, access their properties through WFS/WCS, then process the data using WPS passing WFS/WCS features as parameter and displaying back the result. Can be based on the last part of the current workshop, some work have to be done to provide an OpenLayers client for raster example different from what is already available on the web.

  2) Practical introduction to ZOO-Project and Services development using Python : how to implement simple services provider : this would be a similar but improved version of the current material. This should not contain the section about OpenLayers. Indeed, I think that here the most important point is to present how it is simple to implement new services not how to integrate them with a client side application, the client side application can be view in introduction and ready to handle all the services which will be developed during the workshop by attendees. This mean, process but also display result and things like that. We can start using the OpenLayers client using at the beginning the existing C implementation of the services which will be implemented in Python during the workshop.

  3) Overview of ZOO-Project for advanced developer : here I would like to present to attendees not only how to implement services more or less complexes, it would be really interresting I think to show them how to use ZOO-Project to add logic and chain small (or not!) processes using the JavaScript support and the ZOO-API. The capabilities of ZOO-API will be pointed out and how you can manipulate the data coming from one service, pass them to another service and then combine both.

For 2 and 3 I propose to add a specific short section in the workshop to present how to use the U.N.O. API to produce OpenOffice document displaying a map and some plot (using only U.N.O. API).

As I said I tried to make short, in fact reviewing this old email I made shorter and shorter :) ... But the main Ideas are here.

So I hope that experienced PSC members in workshop can tell what is the better way. I know that it is a huge work to prepare a workshop, but from my point of view, last ZOO-Project FOSS4G Workshop was also a big advantage for our project as we provided good material introducing services implementation using ZOO-Project, I think. 

I would like you to give me feedbacks about those proposal and what you think about proposing both of them as workshop and tutorial. This can also mean even more work to provide tutorial version (lightweight) and workshop version but then better material for ZOO-Project users in the future which is also important. We also have to think on what is the best way to gain workshop attendees interest, that is why I think at least two workshops have to proposed, one for the users and one for the developers.


I hope to hear and learn from you,
Best


[1] http://zoo-project.org/videos/QGIS-Demo.mov

Djay
ZOO-PSC Chair
gerald.fenoy at geolabs.fr