Category Archives: geomajas / GIS

Plug-ins and faces overview for Geomajas

Last week, I gave a training for the Geomajas spatial application framework. Part of the training includes an overview of all the components of Geomajas. We call these the faces and plug-ins. Most of the components in the list have been released, though some are still work in progress.

The presentation with the list is now available:

For more details, see the Geomajas community. More information about all aspects of the framework can be learned in the Geomajas training.

(Unfortunately, some of text on the slides has been distorted by the slideshare conversion process).

The Geomajas project release releases back-end 1.10, three independent projects and 15 plug-ins

This announcement is somewhat late. We were expecting to be able to release the new showcase as well, but progress is a bit slow on that front.

Still, 2012 has been good till now. We have been very active on the release front. We released three new projects which do not require the actual framework but can more easily be used in existing projects.

  • Geomajas Geometry project: DTOs for Geometries and services to manipulate the DTOs (GWT compatible).
  • Geomajas API project: set of annotations for indicating API.
  • Geomajas SLD project: DTOs for handling SLD and conversion between the DTOs and XML.

These new projects are available under the Apache License 2.

For the framework itself, the following new releases have been published:

  • Geomajas back-end 1.10.0
  • GWT face 1.10.0, moving reusable code to common-GWT 1.0.0
  • GeoTools layer 1.9.0
  • geocoder plug-in 1.2.0
  • printing plug-in 2.2.0
  • hibernate layer 1.9.0
  • wms layer 1.9.0
  • staticsecurity 1.9.0
  • caching plug-in 2.0.0

Most notable changes include:

  • SLD support
  • Update to GeoTools 2.7.4
  • New LegendImageService
  • Synthetic attributes
  • Better client-side logging and exception handling
  • Faster initial rendering of the map
  • Improved security handling
  • Full documentation and LDAP support for staticsecurity
  • Caching now uses Infinispan 5.1, increasing reliability and performance
  • WMS layers can now be cached
  • Many usability and documentation improvements, added configuration options and bug fixes

Very significant, the rasterizing plug-in has seen the initial release (1.0.0). The rasterizing plug-in renders vector layers server-side (with caching). It gives more styling options than client-side rendering and is faster when there are many features.

We have also built some milestone releases for some plug-ins. This make the ongoing work more visible to the outside world without committing ourselves to the planned API.

  • Editing plugin 1.0.0-M1: more powerful and more user-friendly geometry editing on the client
  • Utility widgets 1.0.0-M1: general reusable SmartGWT widgets including ribbon, wizard etc
  • Feature info widgets 1.0.0-M1: more power to display feature information
  • Search and filter widgets 1.0.0-M1: more powerful searching and filtering

As usual, there is no need to remember version numbers if you are using geomajas-dep. The latest version there is 1.12.8. The maven archetype has also been updated.

You can find the release notes in our issue tracker.

Appeal

If you like Geomajas, please support us. You can help to project using many kinds of contributions. If you have a problem, saw something in the documentation which is unclear, have an idea for an improvement (features or increased usability), let us know. Mention Geomajas to you friends and colleagues, tweet about it, write blogs, vote for us on ohloh, improve the wikipedia page, contribute documentation patches or code. We can really use your help!

What’s coming?

A lot of cool stuff is being worked on at the moment, including

  • More widgets
  • Additional features
  • Reporting using JasperReports
  • Profiling
  • SLD editor
  • Dynamic configuration plug-in
  • TMS layer
  • PureGWT face, smaller to download, better for mobile (but more manual layout vs using SmartGWT)
  • Widgets for the PureGWT face
  • and more…

Spatial data in the enterprise BeJUG session

Last thursday there was an interesting BeJUG session about spatial data in the enterprise. During this session, Karel Maes (from Hibernate Spatial) gave an introduction to spatial data with some info on interesting Java projects.

This was followed by an introduction to three Belgian open source GIS projects:

Hibernate Spatial
GeoLatte
Geomajas

The slides for the Geomajas introduction can be found on SlideShare.

The examples which are mentioned are the recordings from Ktunaxa RMS and the maven archetype.