Packaging PostGIS dev releases with Docker We recently added support for GML curves to PostGIS, which enables TinyOWS to deliver WFS requests with curve geometries. More on this in a later post. This enhancement is in the current PostGIS developement version (SVN master) and not released yet. To enable our customer testing this functionality, we had to build packages for their server environment which is Ubuntu Precise with UbuntuGIS repositories. After working with Linux LXC containers and it’s predecessor VServer for years, Docker was a logical choice for a clean reproducible build environment. Read on

Neues in QGIS 2.2 Nach dem lange erwarteten Release von QGIS 2.0 im September 2013, sind ab diesem Jahr neue Versionen im Viermonatszyklus geplant. Es werden die neuen Funktionen in QGIS 2.2, wie z.B. DB-Relationen mit verschachtelten Formularen, die erweiterten Methoden zur Transformierung geographischer Koordinatensysteme, zahlreiche Verbesserungen im Print Composer und ein komplett überarbeiteter DXF Export vorgestellt. Zusätzlich wird eine Vorschau auf das multithreaded Rendering gegeben und die neuen Mitglieder im Project Steering Committee vorgestellt Read on

Datum transformations with grid shift files are used in several countries to convert coordinates between different datums. In Switzerland, datum transformation using the NTv2 method is important because of the upcoming conversion between the LV03 system and the new LV95 system. Up to now, doing coordinate transformations with grid shift files was possible in QGIS, but unconvenient. To use an NTv2 transformation in QGIS, the grid shift file needs to be placed in a directory where proj4 can find it (usually /usr/share/proj on Linux and OSGeo4W\share\proj on Windows). Read on

The city of Winterthur recently launched their new public map portal, based on Mapfish Appserver. Some of the features are outlined in the online help (in German). Mobile users are redirected to the OL3 Mobile Viewer, which is based on OpenLayers 3 and jQuery Mobile. To have a look at it from your desktop browser follow this link. In contrary to the desktop version, most of the background layers are delivered as tiles and only topic layers are full size WMS requests. Read on

Nowadays, most computers have several processor cores. However, most computer programs are still designed to only use one processing unit. As a convenient and portable way of writing software using all the available processing power, Qt provides the excellent QtConcurrent framework. In 2010, a Google Summer of Code project examined the suitabilty of using Qt concurrent for rendering the map image in QGIS using several processor cores. Following that approach, each layer renders its image in a separate thread. Read on