This will be my last blog for this year. I am on holidays after today, so no more ramblings for a while. Traditionally in the last month of the year, you look back on the past year and look forward to the next. So, here is my take on it.more >
Last week there was a QGIS course at our institute. Since the Ilwis-objects work consumes all my times these days, I didn’t attend myself. I did, however, find it interesting to hear what others thought about it. After all, why are we building Ilwis-objects if a big, successful open source package exists in the same niche? Good question, but then again why is Volkswagen building cars when Toyota is doing the same? Functionally, they are the quite similar, aren’t they? They have four weels, an engine and some controls. No need for others…more >
In ILWIS 3 we had a lot of hassle with imports and exports. ILWIS 3 had its own format and everything had to be converted to this format or exported from ILWIS 3 to be usable in another package. Though there was a ‘use-as’ method (for raster), which basically used the data in its orignal format, it had its limitations. Furthermore, there was always lots of work involved (for the programmers) in getting a format ‘correct’. The documentation of formats is often mediocre, so a lot of guessing about how to interpret a certain format took place. The usage of the GDAL library helped a lot, but the implementation of a new format was still a hassle. And then there were the service/remote data sources, which play an increasingly important role these days. ILWIS 3 wasn’t built for those and supporting them was like trying to teach a turtle to fly.more >