Which features do you want in Geomajas?

The 1.7.1 release of Geomajas is now in staging and will hopefully be available this time next week. We believe this is a major step forward as this introduces the plug-in system and many other improvements.

However we now have to consider what to do next. What do you want to do using Geomajas and which features would you like to see implemented in the framework?

We need your feedback to help us determine priorities and to give input for the roadmap.

Please give us ideas about the things you want to see improved, about new features you would like or even far-fetched ideas about future directions for the project.

Thanks for your help to make the project better,
Joachim

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Performance: Rasterization plug-in

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 24/08/2010 - 12:41.

Hello,

we are thinking of using Geomajas for our customers as an alternative to our desktop GIS.

Already testet it and wrote a short test application. Configuration is easy and security concept seams very good (thanks for that).

I think the most import thing would be the Rasterization plug-in for us.

We are always working with many large vector datasets (up to 20 different layers, each one could have more than 100000 records) and I do not want to set up a WMS for every layer in Geoserver and configure it after that in Geomajas.

For rendering the StreamingRender of Geotools could be quite interessting. Or maybe there could be a full integration of parts of geoserver.

Best would be a mixture of Rasterization and Vectorisation, e.g. if only viewing without snapping and editing --> show it as raster. If editing --> transfer the vector.

Although it would be very nice to disable tiles for special layers (sending just one big request to ORACLE is much better than sending a request for each tile). Tiling could then be done on serverside by the app itself.

Also important would be a good printing tool with an own template language.

And last but not least.

It would be very good (and needed for use in bigger production environments) to add data and their layer definition during runtime. This should be possible for the current session and for the basic configuration of the server as well. A data upload would be very nice as well the possibillity to add configuration using a transfer object. It should also be possible to sent this transfer object to the client (for editing).

The GUI for this would be nice but GWT is very simple, so everybody could implement this on his own...

Keep on good work,

Christian

By the way. Send a registration to your server a few weeks ago and received no answer yet.

Thanks for your

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Tue, 24/08/2010 - 14:15.

Thanks for your feedback.

Some quick replies.

Rasterization is one of our top priorities and will immediately use caching. We will be working on this after foss4g.

Initial implementation will probably depend on Geotools.

It will indeed use the raster/vector combination you mention (it actually already works like that).

I don't really understand your point about doing tiling on the server side. All the processing is done server-side already. You could already configure the pipeline to use one request for the entire space and cache that).

A printing plug-in should be available in the next two weeks (Jan is finalizing that and a vote will soon be started for the initial release). We have plans for a much more advanced printing plug-in but that will probably require either community help or a sponsor to materialize.

Dynamic configuration is already planned and high on our priorities list.

For your registration request, something must have gone wrong. You should try to register again or use the "lost password" link on the login screen.

Kind regards,

Joachim

Thanks for quick

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 24/08/2010 - 17:15.

Thanks for quick reply,

sorry for being misunderstood (could be that I understood something wrong) concerning tiling.

It is clear to me that tiling is done on server side.

When requesting vector data for a viewport (I used SHAPE with Geotools datastore), the viewport is split up into smaller viewports because of tiling. Now for every one of this smaller viewports a single request is sent to the underlaying datastore.

Concerning ORACLE every viewport request leads to a lot of database requests (one per tile) for fetching the data, instead of doing just one request for fetching the whole data needed for drawing the viewport. For most data the current behaviour is just okay, but for some layers I do not want tiling.

Regards,

Christian

Once the caching is in place,

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Wed, 25/08/2010 - 09:46.

Once the caching is in place, a flag could be added to do the tile boundary filtering in code instead of in the database. This could either be done by modifying the rendering pipeline, or by adding a configuration in the layer. For adding the layer configuration, please add an issue in jira.

Features for roadmap

Submitted by David Pinheiro (not verified) on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 18:00.

1-configuration GUI.

I think this is the most important thing for geomajas to have a boast on its usage (and you can go directly for 2.0.0 as this is a major step).

2-LDAP validation

Very important for companies/organizations.

--> Keep on the good work!

David Pinheiro

Configuration GUI will not be

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 19:38.

Configuration GUI will not be 2.0. We plan to only do that when wre really need to change the API. We plan to keep the stable API as long as possible, so look forward to Geomajas 1.20.0 or higher.

Thanks for your feedback, I am including all suggestions!

Kind regards,

Joachim

ImageIO-EXT GDAL Plugin feature

Submitted by GIS (not verified) on Sat, 31/07/2010 - 09:38.

Please, add feature to use ImageIO-EXT GDAL Plugin to support various kind of ratser image files.

Thanks. Your suggestion is

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 19:40.

Thanks.

Your suggestion is included.

Kind regards,

Joachim

New features to consider

Submitted by Romangis on Sun, 01/08/2010 - 18:21.

Hello everyone,

I will like the following features to be considered in the next release

1. Address Geocoder (MAJ-965)

One key feature for a business GIS solution is the ability to geocode business data eg customer addresses, sales etc
As a result an address geocoder is needed. This will enable the production of maps that combine geographic information with business data.

2. WCS Layer

Just like the existing wms layer in geomajas. The ability to view coverage data from a WCS compliant server (eg geoserver) will be cool.

3. Routing.

The ability to determine the shortest path between two nodes in a road network.
Though I am not sure how feasible this will be to implement because routing functionality seems to be better implementing a database eg pgrouting or oracle spatial. However I just recently found out that the geotools library has routing functionality. It will be nice if this is considered.

4. Improvement to search by location command (MAJ-966)
This is not a new feature but an enhancement to an existing feature. I raised
this issue in jira sometime ago.

Currently the SearchByLocationCommand looks for all features in a certain area around a specific location and optionally allows the user to pass in a buffer.

The only thing missing here is a sorting function to sort the resulting features by distance. This will enable nearest neighbour queries which is a key component in LBS applications.

5. Configuration GUI

Although this is already on the road map. But it is probably the most important feature I will love to see in the next version. An xsd for configuring the geomajas xml should be created to make the server xml configuration easier and less error prone. An xml editor can be used to validate the xml to check for errors and as stated in the geomajas road map to further improve the useability of the system, a GUI will be great !!!

Cheers,

Roman.

Url to geotools routing module (java docs)

Submitted by Romangis on Thu, 05/08/2010 - 09:08.

I just thought i should include a link to the geotools routing module java docs. http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTDOC/Graphs#Graphs-FindingtheShortestPathbetweentwoNodes

As geomajas already uses geotools as one of its dependencies this will be a good inclusion. U guys are doing great !!!

Cheers,

Roman

Thanks for your input. I will

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 11:20.

Thanks for your input. I will include these in the list.

Some additional questions thoug. For the address geocoder, do want this to use your own data or do you want to use an existing service? If using an existing service, which services were you considering?

Joachim

What I have in mind

Submitted by Romangis on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 13:20.

What I have in mind is the use of my own data.

Thanks,

Roman.

Ok, so it should be pluggable

Submitted by Joachim Van der... on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 19:39.

Ok, so it should be pluggable to allow using own data, Google API, Yahoo,... We'll keep it in mind.

Joachim

6. Reverse geocoding

Submitted by Romangis on Fri, 06/08/2010 - 08:49.

6. Reverse geocoding

Any application that deals with remote locations e.g. asset tracking etc. - has a requirement for reverse geocoding. The ability to reverse geocode multiple point locations in real time is a valueble feature.

Cheers,

Roman.