uDig in GSoc 2012

Same as in the past years uDig it partecipating in the Google Summer of Code 2012.

This year two students proposed projects to our community:

Carol Hansen, which will enable uDig users to plot shortest-path route of OSM data, using a Neo4j-Spatial API. She will be mentored by a last year's students of our community, Davide Savazzi, and supported both by Neo4j's and our community.

The second project is by Marco Foi, an Italian Geologist, which will bring back what the latest releases of uDig are heavily missing: the Axios toolset. As his project states, he will be porting the Axios Spatial Tools into uDig core 1.3. Marco will be mentored by our vector tools expert Mauricio Pazos.

We all do welcome Carol and Marco into our community and hope they will enjoy the projects they are starting to work on.

Big kudos go to the Osgeo coordinators and the Summer of Code project for their support and patience during the less technical parts of the project kick-off.

The 10 minutes bug code sprint

What is the 10 minutes code sprint?



A code sprint in which bugs and feature requests will be fixed that are supposed to take only 10 minutes to the involved developer (in a perfect world).


Further info at the Osgeo wiki.

Open Source Geospatial

A recent discussion on OSGeo-Discuss has reminded me of a question we often get with respect to uDig development (or even just open source geospaital development). What is available?

With that in mind here are some links that you can use when starting your research:

• http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/ Stefan Steiniger has put together a nice summary of Desktop GIS application
  
• Open Source Geospatial A recent presentation given by Jody Garnett at the Sydney Open Source Developers Conference. The Slides have been modified from a presentation provided by Mark Leslie.

We of course are very pleased with the open source geosptial scene, and uDig as a product. You will find a real sense of compitition and collaboration between the products mentioned here.

Finally it is worth just trying out open source geospatial:

• http://www.gisvm.com/ provides a linux distribution with much of the open source geospatial projects included ready for you to try out. They have been very kind in their dealings with uDig and we are happy to recommend their distribution.
  
• http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc A wiki used to construct both the FOSS4G 2008 live DVD and theArramagong DVD funded by the CRS-SI.
  

Remember as you deal with these projects that the course of the future is plotted by you, our user community.  If any product here does not meet your needs please talk to the developer community in question, you will find all of these projects responsive to your input and enthusiastic about to domain we work in.