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.
From an email I’ve been sending around:
As part of an effort to seek out Open Source Geo people in the Boston area, I’m canvassing the local community for interest in a regular open source geospatial interest group meeting.
For those of you who don’t know, OSGeo is a non-profit organization which is seeking to fulfill an umbrella organizational role for a number of Open Source Geospatial software projects, including projects like GeoServer and OpenLayers. It is currently entering its third year of operation, and has a number of projects undergoing incubation currently to become "OSGeo projects", including everything from uDig and QGIS to GRASS to GeoServer.
The goal of having regular meetings would be:
Essentially, I personally envision this as being very similar to a Linux Users Group meeting: go someplace, here a 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes of questions on a particular related topic, then head out, get beers someplace, and relax.
If such a thing were to take place in the Bostonish area, would anyone in the area be interested in attending? Anything in particular that strikes your interest?
Looking forward to hearing from anyone interested in creating a local group of OS Geosoftware users…
In the last couple weeks I’ve contributed to two other OSGeo projects, besides OpenLayers:
Even though they are minor changes, it feels nice to participate outside the OpenLayers/MetaCarta bubble.
For the past week, I’ve been working on OpenLayers 2.5, which has been rewarding, though exhausting. I’m looking forward to getting our first RC out the door — maybe even sometime next week, if I can get enough attention from other developers. Check out the post for an overview of some of the cool stuff coming up in the next release: GeoJSON, better vector feature editing support, better commercial API interactions, and more.
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.
Today, I finally made the switch from the 7 month-running Mapnik based homepage map on the boston freemap to a MapServer 5.0-based AGG rendering.
The new map has had more cartography put into than any existing Boston Freemap to date. Maps like:
Cambridgeport
The state of Massachusetts
Downtown Boston
All demonstrate some of the qualities offered by the new MapServer.
Among other things, the new maps:
In my opinion, the look and feel of these maps really does approach the level of quality that the commercial services have set, as far as rendering goes. MapServer’s leaps and bounds in the past couple weeks in rendering have changed the game from being a “Work on the rendering” game back to a “Work on the cartography” game.
I want to send a special thanks to tbonfort and all the work he’s done recently to make this happen! The rendering is simply incredible in comparison — truly night and day. I’m so happy to be back in MapServer land where the hard work I’ve done on this cartography hasn’t gone to waste. He and the other MapServer developers have really brought me back into the fold with the latest work, and I’m happy to be there.
The font work really doesn’t show up well in a small screenshot — it’s a total affect that makes a difference. Comparing AGG to GD is probably pretty informative though.
So, OpenLayers wants to use a single well-known number to describe the ‘Google Projection’ I talked about earlier. 54004/54005/41001 are all ‘well known’ as being a standard Mercator projection. Which is not the Google Projection.
So, in addition to http://spatialreference.org/ref/user/google-projection/ / http://spatialreference.org/ref/user/6/ , we need something we can use in “SRS” in WMS — an EPSG code, such as it was.
In order to pick one that doesn’t conflict.
It’s the ‘Google’ projection — so we picked 900913. (Google. In 1337-speak.)
Use it. Love it. Promote it.
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A MapServer developer (Thomas Bonfort) pinged me this morning, using my Boston Freemap as remote testing of a patch for MapServer’s agg rendering. (It was a very minor difference: little rounding errors were causing small black pixels in some places on the map.) In the process of testing a patch for him, he also pointed out that the newest SVN has added AGG symbol support.
The end result is that my comparison from the other day has now gotten even better:
MS 4.10:
SVN Rev 6432 + minor patch:
Now the only thing that’s left is to fix those labels… Wonder if I can learn enough C++ in the next week or two to help get that in. 😉
Nicely done work on the symbols! Better every day.
With Steve Lime’s help on my previous post on the topic, I’ve been able to turn my previously somewhat dissappointing map into something that is definitely coming out way ahead of where it was. (Click the image to see a bigger version of the same area).
First trick: Removing ‘antialias true’/’transparency alpha’ lines from my mapfile, as Zac and Steve both mentioned on the previous post. This actually did most of the work. Looking back, had I actually removed them all, that would have done all of the work, but I missed one, so my polygon fills were still not working. Thankfully, Steve is a great man, and committed fixes for that to trunk, so now I’ve got real pretty images serving up out of the Boston Freemap. With these changes, the label problems aren’t nearly as pronounced as I’d seen them be on other maps.
I definitely feel like this is a huge step in the right direction.
Old:
New:
Pay extra attention to the T lines, which are one of the more obvious failings of the GD rendering.
Many many thanks to Steve for his help in turning the rather disappointing map into something that I’m really very happy with. I’m glad to be proven wrong — in exactly the way I hoped I would be — on the problems with MapServer’s AGG rendering. I’m looking forward to converting more maps in the near future.
So, I’ve just made some updates to spatialreference.org:
With this, I think I have removed my need to ever have to touch /usr/share/proj/epsg again. The reasons I touched it in the past were usually to search based on title or to add a new projection. Once the new GDAL/OSR is out and installed where I need it, I will be able to use SR.org as references rather than needing to edit proj/epsg to add my own.
Also, for the record, I love Django. This has been the easiest web coding of my life. I spent yesterday porting a half-baked app that was spread over 4 different SVN directories into one Django app. Took me a day, but now instead of a bunch of half-baked stuff that can only be put together by me, I can actually hand the code to someone else and have them run it. (It’s still a bit hard to get up and running on some platforms, because it depends on PostGIS, Python bindings for Postgres, MapScript, OGR, and GDAL. Which are non-trivial on non-Linux platforms.)
It’s great. Thanks to hobu for getting me started with it.