Using the git log leading up to the 1.7 release (June 2011) I put together a graphic that shows the growth of committers working on the project.
In 2002 we had two people (me alone up until October). You can see significant jumps in developer interest in 2004 and 2008:
In 2004 there were a number of releases that added significant functionality Following an announcement at FOSS4G 2007 in Victoria we released 0.
Suppose you have a DBF (.dbf) file containing X and Y values that you want to import and save as a spatial layer.
QGIS doesn’t support direct import of a DBF file as a map layer, however, we can use some command line magic to convert it to a CSV file and then use the Delimited Text plugin to get the job done.
Your DBF file should have an id for each record and fields containing X and Y values.
An interesting visualization of QGIS development over the last eight years:
http://woostuff.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/generating-a-gource-source-commit-history-visualization-for-qgis-quantum-gis/
The application deadline for the Google Summer of Code is nearing (April 9).
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!
The recent release of QGIS 1.0 provides an excellent opportunity for developers looking to create standalone mapping applications with Python.
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.
Marco Hugentobler at the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich has announced the QGIS MapServer project.
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.