[Freegis-list] Geoinformatica version 0.8

[Ari Jolma]

Hello,

After a lot of work I've prepared a 0.8 release of the Geoinformatica 
stack of free geospatial software. Geoinformatica is a stack, which is 
based on GDAL and OGR (through which Proj4, PostGIS, GEOS are 
available), depends on GTK+ and Cairo to provide visualization and GUI, 
and uses Perl to glue everything together. Geoinformatica uses also 
libral for raster algebra.

The core parts of the release are available at 
http://map.hut.fi/files/Geoinformatica/v0.8/ , the Perl modules are also 
at CPAN. Besides these at least a new GDAL is more or less required. 
There's a convenient almost-all-in-one (GTK+ has to downloaded 
separately but Perl is included) Windows port available at 
http://map.hut.fi/files/Geoinformatica/win32/

The homepage of Geoinformatica is at 
http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi/twiki/bin/view/Main/GeoinformaticaSoftware

The goal of Geoinformatica is provide a high-level, high-quality and 
fast programming, CLI and GUI application development environment for 
geospatial domain. Geoinformatica also contains a simple desktop 
geospatial data viewer-browser-visualizer-CLI (implemented in ~100 lines 
of Perl code).

I'd be very happy to hear comments, complaints, and suggestions from 
people who try it out. The Windows port should be very simple to set up 
and try (install GTK+ from http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net, download 
latest Geoinformatica.zip, unzip to C:\ and run gui.bat).

This release is an intermediate point in a road to 1.0 and contains many 
issues:

- the PostGIS-connection seems to be broken in the Windows port
- the APIs, although stabilization has now a high priority, may still 
change somewhat
- the Perl in the Windows-port is in-house compiled MinGW version and 
MinGW+MSYS is used for other parts as well (including GDAL and its Perl 
bindings)
- visualization is not yet completely Cairo-based, thus for example PDF 
output is not yet available
- the extension mechanisms are not yet very well developed in all cases 
(extending Geoinformatica with other FOSS libraries and domain-specific 
toolsets has a high priority)
- numerous small details are not as they should be

Enjoy,

Ari

-- 
Prof. Ari Jolma
Geoinformaatio- ja paikannustekniikka / Geoinformation and positioning
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 451 3886 address: POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://www.tkk.fi/~jolma