And imagine that
Mapserver 1.0,
GeoServer 1.0 and
QGIS Server 1.0
had all been released at the same date. What would these deployment
numbers have been like now?
Regards,
Raymond
On 09-06-2020 01:18, Nyall Dawson wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 at 09:12, Tim Sutton <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi
Nice, thoughtful message below, thanks Jonathon. I wonder what it will take to
move the needle above 1%? And whether we should try to use our funds to make
that happen. QGIS is surely the most expressive way to do cartography of any
GIS out there (acknowledging total bias on my part) and seeing that cartography
on the web would surely please many people. Clients like QWC, QWC2 or anything
that requires you to hand edit a config file or log into a unix shell to
publish map services are probably the main limitation (no offence to those
tools). Also the lack of an built in tiling server (with proper metalling and
meta buffering) must surely be the other. Maybe a more useful approach to your
discussion below would be to promote funding the elements that add resistance
to deploying QGIS server……but then we would be in new feature space and
circling back to the idea of not funding QGIS Server with grants…..
Something else to consider is whether technologies like WMS are
ultimately just "dead end" technologies now, and possibly we'd be
better off focusing on client side rendering of vector features from a
server (QGIS or other), and providing a library which can do
client-side rendering of vector tiles from QGIS symbology in as close
to 1:1 as possible...
Nyall
Regards
Tim
On 8 Jun 2020, at 21:42, Jonathan Moules <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi List,
Some of you may have seen my blog post on the OSGeo-Discuss list about which
mapping servers are the most deployed. For those who haven't seen it, QGIS
Server has about 60 public deployments (1% of all of them), and it serves
11,924 datasets (0.5% of all public geospatial WMS/WFS/WCS/WMTS datasets).
Potentially controversial here and I appreciate it's not a competition, but
given the low uptake of QGIS Server compared to other Open Source offerings
(GeoServer: 964 deployments, 963,603 datasets; MapServer: 544 deployments,
389,709 datasets), is QGIS Server something the grant program should be
funding? There are three Server proposals totalling €10,000, 22% of the fund.
Now, before you get the pitchforks out(!), please consider the following:
* Zero sum game - Any money spent on QGIS Server cannot be spent on QGIS
Desktop. (The grants mostly aren't things that will improve the shared QGIS
Core). (This reasoning also follows through to OSGeo funds).
* Multiple solutions - Open Source (and OSGeo) already has a very healthy
ecosystem of mapping servers - does it need another one?
* Limited number of users benefited - I don't have stats for it, but QGIS
Desktop is probably the most popular Open Source Desktop GIS, and is certainly
going to have many orders of magnitude more users than QGIS Server.
* Playing to your strengths - QGIS' strength is it's Desktop and it's generally
good practice to play to your strengths.
So given the above, and that QGIS is already "winning" as an Open Source
Desktop (great job!), I'd like to suggest it's not a good idea to dilute the limited
resources by spending them on QGIS Server. Instead it seems that far more people would
benefit if that money was spent on Desktop, especially the bug fixing programme.
Or alternatively, given the "Unique Selling Point" of QGIS Server is its
integration with QGIS Desktop, those resources could be used to further improve
interoperability with GeoServer/MapServer/deegree/etc. Those are all successful mature
OSGeo projects that excel at serving maps, have an architecture designed for it, and
already have huge install bases.
TLDR: QGIS excels at being a Desktop, and I'd like to suggest it should play to
its strengths and focus its limited funds there to benefit the most users.
I shall now retreat to my bunker. :-)
Cheers,
Jonathan
Note: The above only applies to the Grant program and funding; how developers
wish to spend their time, and on which projects is of course their own
prerogative.
(Disclosure: I have no horse in this race; I don't run or administer any
mapping servers, but I have done GeoServer in the past.)
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—
Tim Sutton
Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org
Visit http://kartoza.com to find out about open source:
Desktop GIS programming services
Geospatial web development
GIS Training
Consulting Services
Skype: timlinux
IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
I'd love to connect. Here's my calendar link to make finding time easy.
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