Archive for the FDO Category
You heard me, the Feature Data Objects (FDO) team just committed initial Python support.
I’m not much of a Python hacker, but I have great respect for it. Python has strong support in the open source geospatial world (Hobu and Sean have a lot to say about it), and it is also used by proprietary software such as Safe Software’s FME (pyFME) and ESRI ArcGIS (Hobu’s guide).
Blemishes first: this first code dump is Windows-only (Linux support is promised), and documentation is not yet available. However, the unit tests that were committed should provide an idea of how it works. I found the ApplySchemaTest to be the most instructive. I really encourage Python hackers to start looking at this. As we have found with MapGuide and Java, it can be hard to get everything exactly right with a wrapper, so I’m sure that constructive comments on the FDO users mailing list would be appreciated.
For anyone not familiar with FDO, it is a geospatial data abstraction toolkit, kind of like ODBC on steroids for vector and raster geodata. Earlier this month, following MapGuide’s graduation, FDO was accepted into OSGeo’s incubation process. The project is now taking steps towards a truly open development process, having formed its independent project steering committee (there are a couple slots available; get involved now!) and just posted its first RFC.
FDO has existing providers for many formats (such as SHP, SDF, WMS, WFS, ArcSDE, Oracle, and a whole range of raster formats), and leverages the OGR open source library to provide access to many other formats indirectly. Depending on the capabilities implemented by a specific provider, FDO can support complex geometry (three dimensions, circular arcs, geometry collections, etc), common SQL expressions, all of the standard geospatial predicates (disjoint, crosses, intersects inside, etc), locking, long transactions, and other “tough” features often associated with spatial data.
Since its initial release last year, FDO has garnered a lot of interest, with providers being developed independently by SL-King (Oracle), Refractions Research / Mateusz Loskot (PostGIS), and Safe Software (FME ; all supported formats).
I believe that with dedicated effort being applied to opening the development process around FDO, we will see a lot of good things from this project in the near future.
-J
