Matthew Perry poses the question: Why is the command line a dying art?. Funny how these things go—I was thinking about posting on this same topic just the other day, although I may be repeating myself.
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In Beyond the RDBMS Sean references Martin’s post which in turn points us to a paper (gotta love the web in action) promoting “The End of an Architectural Era”. This paper advocates the complete rewrite (well trashing actually) of current RDBMS code in favor of specialized “engines”.
It’s an interesting read with some good points until I got to this:
Our current favorite example of this approach is Ruby-on-Rails. This system is the little language, Ruby, extended with integrated support for database access and manipulation through the “model-view-controller” programming pattern. Ruby-on-Rails compiles into standard JDBC, but hides all the complexity of that interface.
Rails compiles to JDBC? Now I’m questioning the the whole paper…
Is desktop GIS software a rusty old car with no wheels? Bouncing around the blogosphere sometimes leaves you with that impression. All the excitement these days seems to center around mashups, hacks, and mapping in your web browser. It’s definitely cool stuff. A number of folks think this is the future of GIS, even when it comes to doing analysis.
Part of this trend stems from a desire to deliver mapping to the masses. If you’re a consultant or service provider, it’s a good thing. Being able to provide your “customers” with a toolset over the web makes sense.
What happened to the GISDirtbag?
He (or she?) seems to have disappeared off the face of the blogosphere. After stirring the pot with several posts (see example), he is gone.
I wonder, did the lawyers from some unnamed giant take him down? Or did he say the wrong thing about the wrong person/group/software/topic and disappear on a lonely road late at night?
Perhaps he retired and I missed the announcement. In any event it all seems mysterious and to my suspicious mind, perhaps even sinister…
Lets face it, GIS systems are complicated. Typically there are multiple servers and applications that make up a “system”. Each of these represent a potential point of failure, thus creating a brittle system. Brittle systems break. The definition of the word brittle is:
GIS data is like an illicit drug. You can’t control it. It travels in secret and hides in the dark alleys of your organization. Its effect spreads and enslaves those that use it. In the end it can lead to ruin. Read the rest of this entry »
In this day of GUI GIS, sometimes you can’t beat the good old command line for getting a job done, regardless of whether you use Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, or Windows. This may sound strange coming from someone heavily invested in a GUI project but its true. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my pet peeves is software the “yanks the rug” out from under you. There seems to be a lot of this going around, mainly in the commercial world. What do I mean?
You spend a lot of time designing and developing GIS systems, only to have one of the key features you use “disappear” or radically change in the next version of the software. Often the response is “simply convert to xyz” or something similar. Unfortunately this is easier said than done. For projects dealing in gigabytes or terabytes of processed data, starting over is not an option.
Does this happen in the Open Source world? Probably, however I think that the community support in the OS world is far superior to that in the commerical software world. Paying for support is one thing, having features you absolutely need removed without warning is another.
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