• SVN revisions by others while working on my branch: 177
• Time to complete merge with latest SVN revision: 1 second
• Conflicts: None

Coincidence? Maybe not.

        

If you are interested in working on QGIS as part of GSOC and need ideas, please see Quantum GIS Wiki.

We are waiting for your proposal!

        

To make the process easier, I put together a web tool to generate a plugin that can be used as a starting point. The tool creates a fully functional plugin that can be loaded in QGIS 1.x. The generated plugin contains an icon and a simple dialog with Ok and Cancel buttons.

Give the PyQGIS Plugin Builder a try and feel free to provide comments and suggestions.

        

I recently posted an article on creating a very simple standalone application with Python and QGIS 1.0. Much of the Python efforts thus far have been devoted to creating QGIS plugins. I think now that we have a stable API, you’ll begin to see more custom applications that meet a specialized need.

If you are developing such applications, it would be great to hear from you.

        

QgisToMapServer is different from the plugin in QGIS. It is a standalone Python application providing the following features:

• Create MapServer map files from saved QGIS project files
• Preview the map file (requires shp2img)
• Customizable data path

For full details see: http://spatialserver.net/qgis2ms

        

What’s a beta book? Well in this case it’s a lot like software—feature complete and ready for you to give it a spin.

The announcement from the Pragmatic Bookshelf:
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Desktop GIS
“From Google Maps to iPhone apps, geographic data and visualization is quickly becoming a standard part of life. Desktop GIS shows you how to assemble and use an Open Source GIS toolkit. You’ll find strategies for choosing a platform, selecting the right tools, integration, managing change, and getting support. You’ll get a good introduction to using the many tools available so you can visualize, digitize, and analyze your own mapping data.”

        

From the website:
“QGIS mapserver is a server module for geographic maps. The content of vector and raster datasources (e.g. shapefiles, gml, postgis, wfs, geotiff ) is visualized according to the request parameters. The generated map image is sent back to the client over the internet.”

This project is very much in the early stages, as it requires a specific development version of QGIS. There is a Windows binary available for download as well as packages for Ubuntu (make sure to read the caveat).

You can also view a sample map request that displays the countries of Europe.

        

 bison               fftw3
 fftw3-dev           flex
 g++                 libgeos-c1
 libgeos-dev         libgeos2c2a
 libpq-dev           libpq5
 libqt4-core         libqt4-dev
 libqt4-gui          libqt4-qt3support
 libqt4-sql          libreadline5-dev
 libsqlite3-dev      libtiff4-dev
 proj                pyqt4-dev-tools
 python-qt4          python-qt4-dev
 python-sip4         python-sip4-dev
 qt4-designer        qt4-dev-tools
 qt4-doc             qt4-qtconfig
 sip4                sqlite3
 tcl8.4-dev          tk8.4
 tk8.4-dev           x-dev

Some of these may get installed as part of other packages. Also you’ll likely see a bunch of dependent packages pulled in by the ones above.

2. Get and build GDAL 1.4.1 from source (http://www.gdal.org/)

./configure ‘–without-python’ ‘–with-sqlite=/usr’
make
make install

3. Download GRASS 6.2.1 and build (You can use the 6.3.x snapshots as well – http://grass.itc.it)

./configure –with-tcltk-includes=/usr/include/tcl8.4 \
–with-postgres-includes=/usr/include/postgresql –with-readline –with-sqlite
make
make install

4. Rebuild GDAL 1.4.1 with GRASS support

./configure –without-python –with-sqlite=/usr –with-grass=/usr/local/grass-6.2.1
make clean
make
make install

5. Get the current QGIS unstable from the Subversion repository. You’ll need subversion to fetch the code. If you don’t have it, install it using:

sudo apt-get install subversion

then,

svn co https://svn.qgis.org/repos/qgis/trunk/qgis qgis_unstable

5. Build QGIS using the instructions in: http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/Building_with_CMake
I suggest using a out of source build outlined on the wiki.
If you have problems with cmake finding your GRASS or other components, use ccmake to edit the paths, as well as the install prefix if you like:

cd qgis_unstable
mkdir build
cd build
ccmake ..

Hit ‘c’ a couple of times and then ‘g’ to generate. You are then ready to:

make
make install

Using the Feisty packages makes it a pretty quick process. You only need to compile GDAL, GRASS and QGIS. If you don’t want to use GRASS, you could get by with GDAL 1.3.2 from apt.

You can also use this process to build the 0.8.0 release or the 0.8.1 release candidate in subversion.