Thuban's history (was: Spatial selection Tools and Table Enhancements)

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Monday 02 October 2006 00:58, Barry Windridge wrote:
> I would be interested in hearing about the history of Thuban - why did
> you (intervation) start it and why has the intensity of development
> been reduced. Where do you want it to go in the future?

Thuban was started by Intevation in need for a customer project: 
A scientific tool called GREAT-ER.

Based on our experience as founders of www.freegis.org 
we knew that there was no interactive visualisation tool for geographic data.
In addition we wanted it to be modern, crossplattform, high quality and 
able to run on a complete Free Software stack.
The idea was to leave complicated data processing to heavier GIS,
but provide a responsive frontend to the data and its exploration.
These are unique qualities, way back and still today.

QGIS did not exist when we started Thuban. It was also based on Qt which
was non-free on Windows and aimed to be a full-blown GIS.
Jump and uDig are based on Java which Free Software stack is just now 
approaching a workable state.

We choose a high level dynamic programming language, because the algorithms
are more important for speed and easier designed using such a language.
We kept strict testing rules, like write a test first for new funcationality.
Over 90% of the code instructions are executed when the tests are run.

Development intensity was reduced when the project was sucessfully concluded.
It seems that Thuban was ahead of its time in some areas, like choice of 
programming language. Some of its ideas are not taken up by other groups,
like the GRASS developers. Thuban's community was not growing as big
as it could. Selling native Free Software GIS application 
like Thuban was not easy has customer first discovered the webmapping 
applications. 

Thuban's future is in the hands of the active contributors.
Many technical and design choices are very solid and some even innovative.
The time for native GIS applications will come as it is much easier to write
good interfaces with native widget sets. New concepts like the 
Thuban-Map-SVG are only possible with Free Software.
Personally I would want to see Thuban being available in 
most major distributions and aquiring more features 
of interactive data exploration. One of the next ideas would be
to include an advanced buffering concept to make more remote layers and table 
data acessible.

Bernhard
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