First commit in 2008:
* FeatureServer: r412
* TileCache: r242
* OpenLayers: r5614
All just updates to copyright dates, but hey, they make me fee special.
Lots of different data here:
Gave my FeatureServer talk. What I walked through in prep and what I actually talked about were not so much alike. However, the talk was *extremely* well attended. I feel bad for Charlie, who had way way more preparation — and really, a better talk — and about half the room walked out right before it :/
Still, I think the talk went well, and hopefully people got some information about FeatureServer that they didn’t have before.
Anyone planning on making it to the FeatureServer presentation at FOSS4G? What would you like to hear about?
RESTClient: “RESTClient is a simple, Python + wxWidgets Desktop application for talking to RESTful web services. It is designed to fill a gap in existing offerings by offering support for GET/POST/PUT/DELETE, making it a useful tool when exploring RESTful web services which use a wider range of HTTP verbs.”
Simple. Stupid. It Works.
Having spent some time around SJ Klein the past week, I’m currently hacking on some mapping things for them. I’m also trying to find interesting activities that already exist to try them out: One of the ones I stumbled into is Kuku Anakula (Hungry Chicken). After playing it for a bit, I found it dissappointingly slow to respond to keyboard input. Since Python is a main component in OLPC, it’s written in Python, so I took it apart.
The result is that I refactored the code to make an order of magnitude fewer function calls, and in the process shaved about 50% of the CPU time off, so far as I can tell, when testing on my mac. I learned how to use hotshot, and have the original profiling data and the profile for my refactor. Getting the new version of the activity on the XO was very satisifying: the gameplay is significantly better, and changes the game from being more like a chore to more like a game.
Other things I did today for OLPC include building/installing OGR, and getting FeatureServer set up to run on it with a world borders shapefile. Still got a bit of work to do to build a world map/atlas with click-to-query attributes local on the box, but it’s not too far off.
If you didn’t see them via Slashdot, this set of photos of the OLPC in action is very cute.
Just got notice that I’ll be giving two presentations at FOSS4G 2007:
FeatureServer: A REST-based Server for Simple Features
With the number of tools for creating vector data online growing rapidly over the past year, users have spent more and more of their time creating annotations of existing maps. Unfortunately, managing this user generated data in a web browser can be difficult: the existing tools for storing geographic data on the server are largely based around the WFS-T specification, which is not the most conducive to the browser environment. FeatureServer provides an alternative mechanism for fetching and storing geographic data, using a REST-based interface that is friendly to browsers and other clients alike.
And with Howard Butler:
The Gift Economy Ain’t Free: Getting Help with Open Source Software
Have you ever been told to RTFM? STFW? Sent an email to a project’s maillist that languished for days without a response? This talk will give you ammo that you can use to bust out of the rut of frustration and non-response.
Woot.
I just wanted to thank all the well-wishers in comments on my previous post about the upcoming wedding. For some reason, I hadn’t actually gotten the comment notifications — or I just deleted them as noise — and so I’ve just gone back and approved the 5 comments I got. (And to Taral: the ‘highway’ called RED is actually the Red Line — a subway line. This is a case where local knowledge is assumed. :))
The week post wedding has been relatively peaceful, though our last wedding guests didn’t leave until Thursday, so we’re finally getting a bit of alone time this weekend. Bio-dad has the kids, so I plan to spend the weekend chilling out.
If you haven’t seen FlickrBrowse recently, you might want to check it out: It’s now using the new world wrapping support in OpenLayers, which is kind of nifty. I also added Twittervision support to FeatureServer a couple days ago — not the most useful thing in the world, since the only query type is ‘current location for $username’, but it was almost too easy *not* to do it: the code is only 12 lines.
Maps tell stories. They tell all sorts of stories, but one of the stories that they tell the best are processions: series of photos taken over a wide area over a period of time, but with the same principle actors.
The most important procession to me right now is the one that I’ve been working up to for four years, as of tomorrow. At the church shown (using the Boston Freemap TileCache, FeatureServer for feature translation from the Flickr API, and OpenLayers, of course, as the map interface) on the map I put together, I’ll be getting married tomorrow to the lovely Jessica Allan.
From Chicago to Champaign-Urbana to Manchester, NH to Cambridge, MA, with more late nights and late flights than I care to remember, more love and devotion than I can describe, and more acceptance of my tendencies to show utter obsession with anything I’m doing than I could possibly have expected, my relationship with Jess has flourished, and I couldn’t be happier to be tying the knot tomorrow.
Okay, so the relation this has to mapping or technical ramblings is tentative at best, but I still think it’s cool. 
A better release announcement, which I wrote over on the Labs Weblog:
MetaCarta Labs is proud to announce the release of FeatureServer, an open source, Python based RESTful feature server.
FeatureServer allows you to store points, lines, and polygons in a number of backends, and get the data out all at once or one piece at a time. You can get the data out as KML, JSON, GeoRSS, GML/WFS or even as HTML.
FeatureServer is primarily designed as a lightweight vector feature storage companion to the new OpenLayers vector capabilities.
A demo of FeatureServer in OpenLayers is available at the FeatureServer Demo page. You can see features from this demo in:
FeatureServer is the first project we’ve released under our copyright-only open source license, a move designed to protect both MetaCarta and project contributors. We’re moving forward with getting this license approved by OSI, and plan to release future open source software under this license.
I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and am looking forward to demoing it for people at Where 2.0. I think that FeatureServer really is the first step forward in the world of interacting with geodata on a feature level rather than a giant-database level. Per-feature interaction — view, update, delete — as well as easy-to-use attribute querying are both huge boons when working with lots-o-data: instead of loading 700,000 features, or even just loading features based on a bounding box, you can talk about a feature based on its unique identifier.
It also makes a really great translator — for example, it makes it possible to load up your Flickr photos as a WFS server which you can drop into OpenLayers. No need to depend on the external interfaces: anything which provides a geospatial data API can be converted to a FeatureServer datasource.
The ability to read in GeoRSS and KML are great from the point of view of an aggregator: simply pipe the output of a curl GeoRSS download into a FeatureServer upload, and you’ve got a GeoRSS post collector.
There’s a ton of possibilities, and I’m looking forward to helping people explore them now that the software is available and open source.