Open Source Friday!

Basically I have no idea where the week went. As you can probably tell I’ve been very busy and thus there isn’t much time for blogging about how much I love the shapefile format. In the meantime there is some good open source news you probably need to be aware of.

  • OpenLayer 2.9 Released - Follow that link for the full details, but the take-away from the ESRI DevSummit was if you are doing cool stuff with the ESRI REST API, you are probably doing it in OpenLayers. Why code with something else?
  • zigGIS 3.0 - The defacto tool to access PostGIS from ArcGIS is now open source again. Well it is more complicated than that, but Abe Gillespie has the details on his blog. Basically the project is going to be moving forward with some very cool stuff planned. I’m excited as it makes zero sense to buy ArcSDE to access PostGIS.
  • The R Project - now this isn’t a specific news item, just a reminder that there is a kick ass statistical open source project screaming for you to use it. At the URISA conferences I was at the last two weeks, it appears many don’t know about all the cool stuff you can do with it. My favorite book on learning R (and other open source analytical tools) is Baseball Hacks. ESRI has been showcasing using R with their python tools so you should really want to get into it, just a freaking sweet project. Now if you want to see some geospatial use of R, check out Dylan Beaudette’s blog where he’s been showcasing some cool uses of R.

Anyway, have a great weekend folks. I’ll see some of you next week at GITA 2010. Play me out Joe Morello.


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Date
April 23, 2010