Hi Andreas, (& All),
A fair point, but I believe this is an important point and this year I
do have data to back up my point; in fact the grant program is what
motivated me to finally get around to doing this analysis.
It seems from the replies that while there are a few differentiators,
the key one is indeed cartography and styling. (There's also an
interesting conversation about vectors going on there too). Some thoughts:
* The vast majority of WMS/WMTS layers are not cartographically
complicated, let alone beautiful. They're "here is a layer with small
green points for trees", and "this polygon represents conservation
areas". You can easily play around and see what's out there here:
http://www.geoseer.net/api-demo/
* WFS/WCS can't be styled server side.
* It seems like overkill to create and maintain an entire server
distribution that fundamentally only solves one (relatively simple
compared to what QGIS Desktop can do) problem.
* Rendering is only one part the QGIS package (Analysis, digitisation,
management, etc.).
If I'm honest, the "competition" on this point isn't really between QGIS
and MapServer/GeoServer. It's really between QGIS and ArcGIS. Because
ArcGIS does exactly what QGIS Server seeks to do: offer a single
integrated solution for Desktop-> Server. And certainly ArcGIS Server
does have a huge number of deployments (53%), however again, there
really aren't many cartographically complicated outputs on there. And
despite the huge number of deployments, most services and datasets are
actually served by MapServer/GeoServer (about 60% of datasets between
them!). Basically ArcGIS is deployed by local government and used for
bitty-stuff ("here are our fire stations"), but if you want a real
data-service then you go with GeoServer/MapServer/etc.
Most importantly though, I think I haven't conveyed my core point well:
this really is a zero sum game!
Even allowing for the above, any funds spent on QGIS Server are not
spent on QGIS Desktop. There are 60 public facing QGIS Server
deployments. Even assuming that there's a ratio of 10:1 for
private/public servers (made up ratio, feels too high), any funding on
QGIS Server benefits only hundreds, or being very generous, maybe
low-thousands number of users. Funding on QGIS Desktop however benefits
as a *minimum* tens of thousands, potentially millions of users (no idea
how many QGIS installs there are, I can't find the download-stats I
remember seeing in the past).
Heck, even pretending for a second QGIS Server had 100% of the
deployments (a 100 fold increase!), there would /still/ be orders of
magnitude more people using the not-Server parts of QGIS Desktop by its
very nature.
There are 3,102 open issues on the QGIS issue tracker. 95 are labelled
regressions, 137 are "high priority", and 92 are "crash/data
corruption". Just 49 are "Server". I'm not seeking to denigrate the
project here; QGIS is a extremely complex tool that is an amazing
accomplishment and by its nature it will have bugs. I raise these
numbers to highlight that any money spent on Grants to Server (and yes
new Desktop features) is money that isn't spent fixing these (I'm aware
of the bug-fixing fund). Something I think the grant voters should be
cognizant of.
Hope that clarifies,
I'll step back now. :-)
Cheers,
Jonathan
On 09/06/2020 08:09, Andreas Neumann wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
You keep repeating yourself. You started the exact same discussion a
year ago.
You have a valid point, of course, I don't argue that. But if you think
about small organizations that do not have a lot of personal (or
financial) resources, it would be a lot of burden to invest twice the
time in styling: once for QGIS desktop and another time again for UMN
mapserver and Geoserver. Even if SLD output from QGIS improved (also
thanks to efforts of Andrea Aime and others), it still can't transport
everything. If it would, then I would better agree with your argument.
For such smaller organization, speed (and I know that UMN and Geoserver
are a bit faster than QGIS server) is not the only important thing - it
is also their personal and financial resources and complexity of their
software landscape.
And QGIS server has some other unique selling points: the proprietary
GetPrint command that doesn't have a match in Geoserver or UMN, the
ability to create Atlases from server, and who knows, in the future
perhaps QGIS server can run processing models.
Greetings,
Andreas
On 2020-06-08 22:42, Jonathan Moules 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 EUR10,000, 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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