uDig 1.4.0 Released

The uDig Community is pleased to announce the release of uDig 1.4.0.

This release offers some great new features including the long anticipated GeoScript editor (thanks to HydroloGIS),  a full featured graticule map decoration (thanks to Kenneth Gulbrandsoy), and a new Document view (thanks to LISAsoft).

Thanks to Galdos, lat-lon and LISAsoft for their participation in OWS9. Their extensive quality assurance work has allowed uDig to enable WMS 1.3.0 by default.

On the development front the SDK now functions as standalone target platform complete with Eclipse and GeoTools source code. Thanks to Sam Guymer for this work, and to community members Suraj Patil and Thomas Dolley for testing. We also offer our congratulations to Kenneth Gulbrandsoy for his promotion to committer status.

The release is issued under a dual EPL and BSD license and marks our initial contribution to LocationTech. No further releases are scheduled under the Refractions banner.

Release Details

• uDig Downloads (Mac, Linux, and Windows)
• Release Notes
• Issue Tracker Change Log
• What is new (User Guide)

About uDig 1.4.0

License Transition Complete

The uDig project has changed to a dual BSD / EPL license. This license is in support of our application to LocationTech (an Eclipse Foundations industry working group). 

GeoScript Editor

This release offers some great new features including the long anticipated GeoScript editor. The use of scripting within a GIS application affords a great middle ground between developers and users. The GeoScript project is focused on taming the power of GIS for dynamic scripting languages. This strong focus on ease-of-use makes for an excellent alignment with the uDig project.

Document View

The use of feature attributes as a jumping off point for a document, web page or script action is known as a hot-link, while the concept of an attachment is well-known from the use of email. uDig provides the innovative combination of these two ideas in a single Document view.

As part of this work, dynamic feature labels can be defined (used by the Info Tool and Document view).

About uDig 1.4 Series

The 1.4 series brings several exciting new features to the table while serving as a stepping stone for the project's migration to LocationTech.

For users:

• GeoScript editor allowing scripting directly from the uDig application
• Document view for working with attachments and hot-links
• New graticule map decorator supporting metric coordinate reference systems
• WMS 1.3.0 now enabled by default

For developers:

• Provided under a dual EPL and BSD license with associated refresh of a all headers, plugin license and about.html files.
• Transition to Maven command line build is complete with both product and SDK builds
• SDK is a complete target platform (no longer requires an Eclipse Download).
• Based on GeoTools 9.0-M0

Release notes:

• uDig 1.4.0 Release Notes

Known Issues

• The mac release does not support the full range of ImageIO-EXT formats. Please contact udig-devel if you are in position to build GDAL on Mac OSX.
• The ImageIO-EXT / GDAL library requires native code for MrSID and ECW limiting support to win32 and linux32 platforms.

uDig Officially Joins LocationTech

The uDig team is thrilled to announce that our proposal to join LocationTech has been accepted. The project now has an landing page on the LocationTech website:

• User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)

The list of developers on that page will grow as we get around to filling in our paperwork. There is also a happy "egg" logo next to our project as we are currently "in incubation". Our mentors for this process are Benjamin Cabe and Wayne Beaton.

A big thanks to the uDig team, the helpful people on the location-tech email list, and the Eclipse staff who helped make this happen.

About LocationTech

LocationTech is the Eclipse Foundation industry working group for "location aware" technologies. It is a great fit for the uDig project with our technology stack being based on Eclipse RCP.

The Eclipse Foundation is a vendor neutral, member support non-profit Foundation. We look forward to participating, making friends in the Eclipse community and joining in LocationTech's out reach to industry.

What is Next

The uDig team is busy filling in the paperwork to access LocationTech facilities, and will be migrating the codebase shortly.

One of the initial benefits is access to the Eclipse Foundation intellectual property services. While we are confident our codebase is in good shape, the review by the independent IP team is an important step for the uDig project. The costs associated with intellectual property services is a prohibitive constraint on the adoption of open source in general. The completion of this review for the uDig project lowers risk for everyone involved and makes the project easier to deploy.

We have also enjoyed taking part in the LocationTech industry out reach including a recent video presentation on uDig by Jody Garnett and Frank Gasdorf.

Sneak Peek

While we wait the team will continue working on the 1.4.0 release which will be our last release under the Refractions banner. If you would like a sneak peak, the documentation is online, including the What is New page.

LocationTech uDig Talk November 27th

The Eclipse Foundation is in the process of setting up the LocationTech industry working group.

The uDig project has (in a small way) taken part in the initial organisation of LocationTech, and has gone so far as to change license and submit an application to join!

The industry working group is expected to officially launch "real soon now," and is already hosting a series of talks and demos from a range interesting projects:

• Open Layers 3 - Nov 7th
• Cesium tech talk - Nov 24th (talk is complete but video is up on YouTube)

And coming up:

• uDig GIS tech talk Nov 27th - 5pm EST (click for time in your area)
• Leaflet tech talk - Dec 4th: 11am EST (click for time in your area)

Join the uDig Tech Talk Nov 27th

That's right - uDig google hangout is this week. Follow LocationTech on Twitter for the google hangout URL. We look forward to seeing you!

LocationTech Proposal

If you are interested in tracking the uDig Project's progress towards joining LocationTech here is our community request for change page that shows what is involved, and what tasks we have remaining.

The official proposal is on the LocationTech website. (We are pleased to be the first project listed!)

We would also like to thank our mentor Benjamin Cabé who is introducing us to the eclipse process.

GIS clipping benchmark: uDig results

We recently partecipated at the GIS Clipping benchmark using also uDig's Spatial Toolbox.
We had some quite good results. If you are interested, have a look here.

The new uDig video tutorial series

Today we activated a youtube channel for uDig: http://www.youtube.com/udiggis

Here we want to collect different video material about uDig.

Some members of the community have agreed on creating each week a new tutorial about any feature not yet described.

Need some examples?

Ever needed to change language of the gui?
Or maybe you are new to GIS and are wondering about how to load common gis data formats?
What about query data in uDig?

More advanced users might need to rasterize a shapefile or vectorize a raster?
Scientific users might want to get started with the Spatial toolbox to do some analyses, maybe start with the extraction of a watershed from a DEM?


Anyone can contribute to the channel and anyone can ask for a tutorial about a certain feature.
On this page information about ongoing tutorial production is kept.
If you need a tutorial about any uDig feature, check if it is not already listed there, and if it is not, join the mailinglist and ask kindly. :)

uDig Change to EPL and BSD License

Quick update on the results of the uDig License Change.

First up thanks to the community for filling in the survey, asking questions, and reviewing options on the email list.

The Project Steering Committee has accepted an RFC making uDig available under a dual BSD and EPL license. This is an excellent compromise between using BSD to share code with projects such as GeoTools, while retaining the protection afforded by the Eclipse Public License as we work with downstream Eclipse RCP projects.

There will be a bit of work ahead as we make the transition, thank you for your continued support.

How to convert from Confluence to Sphinx

A collaboration between Frank and Jody has packaged up the uDig User Guide and Developers Guide into the ever fashionable "Sphinx" documentation system.

Sphinx is used by GeoMoose, GeoServer, GeoTools, MapServer, OSGeoLive and well everyone! Sphinx uses Rich Structured Text (RST) to captures documentation as text files. This allows us to manage the documentation along side our source code when making a release.

Kudos to Frank for the excellent research in setting this up so we can use git to publish straight to github.

The same toolchain is used to publish the user guide into the online help included with the application.

With those improvements working out - the wiki has slowly started to fade in anticipation to shutting down. And developed an unexpected Moved to Github link at the top of each page.

Hooking Sphinx up to the Java Maven / Ant Build Chain

Justin DeOlivera gets the credit for this approach, used by the GeoServer and GeoTools projects.

1. Add a pom.xml build plugin compile target for the maven-antrun-plugin
2. Set up a build.xml to run sphinx, taking care to check that it is available

The above build.xml is especially recommended, as out of the box Sphinx produces a make.bat and Makefile (which does little good in a Java tool chain).

Conversion from Confluence (Textile) to Rich Structured Text (RST)

Thanks to Paul for the initial conversion scripts, I was able to use them as a starting point when from the Confluence wiki textile format to the Rich Structured Text format used by sphinx.

I ended up going with Pandoc and which converts one file at a time, with a java BulkExport script that calls Pandoc multiple times, and then cleans up the mess produced by confluence, copies the images over, fixes some header levels and generally gives it a good go.

Usage: java html.BulkConvert [index.html] [rst directory]
Where:
  index.html Where you have unzipped the confluence html export
  rst directory location where you would like the html files saved
If not provided the appication will prompt you for the above information

If any other project is considering making the change the source code is here.

Conversion of Open Office (ODT) to Rich Structured Text (RST)

There are also scripts covering conversion of Open Office documentation to RST. The odt2sphinx script does a fairly good job, but cannot handle image references. Breaking the link in Open Office and then converting produces some very amusing image names, resulting in java ImageRename script:
 Usage: java html.ImageRename [file.rst] [rename.properties]
Where:
  file.rst Used to locate your odt2sphinx files
  rename.properties used to rename files in your images folder
If not provided the appication will prompt you for the above information

Checking Eclipse Help TOC.XML files

The final bit of quality assurance is enforcing a "no page left behind" policy. Set up as a normal JUnit Test case, we rely TocCheck.java to throw an error message if the toc.xml file missed a page, or contains a link to a page that no longer exists.
<topic href="EN/uDig Overview.html" label="uDig Overview">
</topic>

As an added bonus it will send the XML fragment (such as the above) required to fix the problem to standard out (for a quick cut and paste fix).