Andrea,
That looks like an excellent basis to start from.
Were the results of the desktop comparison written up somewhere?
While a feature comparison is valuable, the end user is also interested
is other metrics which are harder to collect.
"How much time is required to do a task? How long does it take to load a
large file, move the file, pan the file, zoom in etc"
"How easy is it for a new user to use this application? How much
training is required to get them up to speed."
"How easy is it to install and configure the application?"
If we have a community of developers willing to build up such a
comparison, I have a client whom I could ask for use cases to address.
Cameron Shorter wrote:
Delegates who voted for the FOSS4G 2009 presentations ranked the OSGeo
comparison projects very highly, which is something I suggest hopeful
FOSS4G 2010 presenters take note of, because competition for speaking
slots will be fierce.
At FOSS4G 2009, 183 quality presentations were submitted, and there
was only 85 speaking slots. In 2010 it is likely to be much harder, as
there is expected to be 2 to 3 times more delegates and many more
hopeful presenters.
In 2009 the community ranked potential presentations, and some of the
highest ranked presentations targeted the comparison of popular
packages. Unfortunately, there were only a few of these types of
presentations.
The presentations were:
* Ranked 2: The WMS Performance Shootout
* Ranked 8: PostGIS and Oracle Spatial
* Ranked 9: There is no alternative to Openlayers...? (discussing
OpenLayers vs other AJAX clients)
The moral to the story is that delegates want to see how different
projects compare, and to date we have had a shortage of such
presentations (partly because they are a lot of work to set up).
However, I strongly suggest that projects start teaming together to
put together such presentations for 2010.
In particular, I'd love to see comparisons between:
* Geospatial Desktop applications
* Geospatial Browser based applications
* Geospatial Servers (WMS, WFS, Tiled Services at the very least)
The comparisons could cover some or all of:
* performance
* robustness
* features
* ease of setup or use
The tests should not be restricted to Open Source, but be open to
proprietary vendors too. (ESRI and ERDAS were invited to participate
in the 2009 WMS shootout, and it seems likely they will participate in
2010).
So who wants to participate?
--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com
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