deegree/Occam Labs in academia

Jürgen Weichand, author of the WFS 2.0 support for the Quantum GIS, recently published his master thesis (German only) on the topic of implementing and using INSPIRE DownloadServices.

While a large focus of the thesis lies on the client side (the WFS 2.0 plugin for Quantum GIS was developed in the context of the thesis), some server side solutions were also evaluated. Since UMN mapserver does not have a WFS 2.0 implementation, only GeoServer and deegree were considered OpenSource-wise, the GO Publisher WFS was chosen as closed-source example.

Looking at table 6.7 on page 67 it seems we're doing pretty well. I'm sure the upcoming 3.2 release will improve the situation even further. And it's one of the first publications explicitly mentioning us at Occam Labs as developers of deegree!

We probably could have made an even more prominent place in the thesis if we had a nicer web administration console ready (chapter 6.2.6 mentions this as the probable reason why GeoServer was chosen for an example implementation, simple features only!). At least with the deegree handbook nearing completion it will allow future thesis writers (and all others of course) to better understand how easy it is to set up a WFS serving rich features with deegree.

Edit: I did not mean to imply that GeoServer can't serve complex features (as Andrea pointed out it has been able to do that for years), it's just not as easy to do using the web interface (which Jürgen Weichand also pointed out in this thesis).

deegree goes GitHub

There's breaking news in the deegree world, as deegree (at least deegree as in the deegree webservices) is now at GitHub! Have a look at the official repository yourself. And help yourself to a fork...

Our main reason for moving to GitHub (besides moving to git as a tool) was to make it easier for people to contribute. And that's exactly what happened! We hadn't even figured out how to properly work with pull requests and the famous git cheap branches and there was our first pull request from an external contributor!

I also extracted the deegree maven plugin into a separate repository. Have a look at the documentation I added in its wiki.

We decided to (gradually) move all developer related documentation to the wiki of the deegree webservices code base, so that should be the primary source of information for now. Links to the old wiki were added where appropriate.

So I hope to see more of those pull requests coming!

In a related note, on Friday (the 18th of January) I'll move some more deegree related projects like the old deegree 2 code base to GitHub as well, and then the svn repository will be shut down/made read only. In case some old project picks up again, I offer to migrate any of the old projects to GitHub, but for building the unchanged code base, the read-only svn should be good enough.