James Fee GIS Blog

Good news from the gdal-announce email list: The GDAL/OGR Project is pleased to announce the release of GDAL/OGR 1.7.0. Yep, you can stop there and get your GDAL/OGR on.  Or maybe you want to know what is new, copied directly from Frank’s email: New Raster Drivers: BAG, EPSILON, Northwood/VerticalMapper, R, Rasterlite, SAGA GIS Binary, SRP [...]

I’ve been a long time fan of running GIS applications on flash drives.   Now that I’m rolling around with a flash drive that you can’t tell is a flash drive, I always have my GIS apps with me.  That said, there is a much easier way to do this than rolling your own apps, [...]

As with GeoServer 1.7.1, the latest release improves some cartographic rendering capabilities of the Open Source server product. 1.7.2 brings wrapped labels and hatching to render some impressive maps. Other new additions include HTML image mapping, OGR extension to output WFS as any supported OGR output formats (I get chills thinking of the possibilities), and [...]

The ArcGIS Server REST[ful] API has been a wonderful addition to the ESRI developer world.  I’ve seen more people talking and deploying RESTful API applications since it was released than I did with 9.2 (YMMV of course).  One thing about it though is there still isn’t a community built around it.  Sure the forums are [...]

I’ve been hearing much about stacks these last few weeks. “We want an all ESRI stack” “We want to break out of the ESRI stack” “I want an all OSGeo stack” “Bill Gates’ stack is the work of the devil” “I want to avoid the [INSERT LEAST FAVORITE SOFTWARE COMPANY HERE] stack at all costs” [...]

I’ve always thought of GeoServer as a great way to get introduced to open source web mapping servers because its Admin page was much easer to use than MapServer.  It looks like at 2.0, the Admin page will get even better as the GeoServer team announced that the new UI is in the 2.0 alpha [...]

The time has come for Mapbuilder to retire.  Look for OpenLayers to benefit greatly with more focus on it.  Should be really interesting moving forward.

libLAS has moved forward and has been released as 1.0.0b1 in the hopes of attracting more testers. For those who haven’t been following, “libLAS is a BSD library for reading and writing ASPRS LAS version 1.0 and 1.1 data. LAS-formatted data is heavily used in LiDAR processing operations, and the LAS format is a sequential [...]

I am excited to read on Jo Cook’s blog that version 1.2 of Portable GIS has been released. The concept of being able to either try out or even use software without having to install it, is how we’ll get GIS applications in the hands of everyone. Plus who doesn’t want to carry GIS on [...]

Gary Sherman has posted a couple documents on his blog that may be of interest to those trying to learn more about QGIS. First off he’s got his slides from his FOSS4G presentation as well as the workbook from the “Shuffling Quantum GIS into the Open Source Software Stack” workshop. Both are a great introduction [...]