[Freegis-list] Choose a GIS program

[Chris Holmes]

> I am doing a proyect about 3D realistic virtual cities. I have to choose
> a GIS OpenSource program (for example: Jump, uDig, qgis, grass, ...).
> With choosed program I will do 3D plugins.

> I have read a lot about these program and it's the moment to choose the
> program based in some criterias: interoperability, portability, easiness
> to develop plugins, ...

> I know that grass+qgis is powerfull tool, but I haver read it is very
> difficult to program qgis plugins on windows. About Jump there is few
> documentation. Maybe uDig is a good choice but I'm not sure which I have
> to choose. Can anybody help me? Which program is appropriate?
I'd say uDig probably makes the biggest effort to make it's plug-ins easy, 
with good documentation, and building upon the eclipse plug-in system, 
which has many books written on it.  And their rendering system is 
modular, so I think it could handle a 3D plugin.  Also Eclipse 3.2M2 has 
opengl support - I don't think they're on 3.2 yet, but I don't think it 
would be hard to plug their framework into 3.2.

Another option you might check out is gvSig - http://gvsig.org  They have 
a pretty good plug-in system I believe.  Though their documentation on 
writing plug-ins isn't there, as far as I know.  

But all the open source desktop GIS systems are still pretty young, so to 
some extent it may depend on how long your project runs and what work the 
different options have planned.  The all have various strengths and 
weaknesses, the best thing to do is probably evaluate each for a bit, as a 
user, and then try to write a very simple plug-in, and see how hard it is.

best regards,

Chris