[Geoserver-devel] Dropping the WMS animator, superceded* by WPS Download

Hi all,
as you know, the WPS download module is now a supported extension. The module provides
a good asynchronous animation building facility, which can be called in a asynchronous way and
generates MP4 movies.

Maybe not many know that WMS has an “animator”, which can build animated gifs:
https://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/tutorials/animreflector.html

It does not compare very well to the WPS download:

  1. Can only do synchronous requests
  2. It’s memory bound
  3. Normally limited to URL size (I guess one could do a form POST though, haven’t tried)
  4. Can only build animated GIFs (hence, relatively low compression)
  5. Can only work with local GeoServer layers (WPS download can do on the fly cascade as well)
    To be fair, it has one advantage over the WPS download, in that it can animate over any WMS
    request parameter, like changing the bbox, or a view param, while WPS download only over time.

I don’t think anyone is seriously using it (did you know it was there in the first place?), and given
its runtime limits and memory consumption, I’d suggest to just drop it. Only on the dev branch,
and we can include a warning in the 2.19.0 release announcement for eventual users to switch
to the WPS download.

Opinions??

Cheers
Andrea

*: well, almost superceded!

···

== GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A 55054 Massarosa (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it ------------------------------------------------------- Con riferimento alla normativa sul trattamento dei dati personali (Reg. UE 2016/679 - Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati “GDPR”), si precisa che ogni circostanza inerente alla presente email (il suo contenuto, gli eventuali allegati, etc.) è un dato la cui conoscenza è riservata al/i solo/i destinatario/i indicati dallo scrivente. Se il messaggio Le è giunto per errore, è tenuta/o a cancellarlo, ogni altra operazione è illecita. Le sarei comunque grato se potesse darmene notizia. This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. We remind that - as provided by European Regulation 2016/679 “GDPR” - copying, dissemination or use of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail.

+1, less code, less duplication…

···

Regards,
Simone Giannecchini

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Visit http://bit.ly/gs-services for more information.

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@simogeo
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Italy
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Con riferimento alla normativa sul trattamento dei dati personali (Reg. UE 2016/679 - Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati “GDPR”), si precisa che ogni circostanza inerente alla presente email (il suo contenuto, gli eventuali allegati, etc.) è un dato la cui conoscenza è riservata al/i solo/i destinatario/i indicati dallo scrivente. Se il messaggio Le è giunto per errore, è tenuta/o a cancellarlo, ogni altra operazione è illecita. Le sarei comunque grato se potesse darmene notizia.

This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. We remind that - as provided by European Regulation 2016/679 “GDPR” - copying, dissemination or use of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail.

+1 I am fine with dropping this, I did know it was there and have only ever used it in demos.

The timing is good to make a note in the release announcement.

Jody

···


Jody Garnett

Hi,

Funny thing, i just discovered this endpoint again just now and found out that it does not work for “env” variables as advertised.

I tried various combinations of aparams=env and avalues=parameter:value1,parameter:value2 etc but none seems to be working.

I started to debug the code to find the issue, but it may be more future proof to checkout that download WPS.

I am not yet sure how good the old animate endpoint integrated into WMS clients, as it tends to be somewhat “GetMap” like.

So i guess it could be used in e.g. openlayers to request and draw those animated gifs on the map.

I assume that this is getting more complicated with a WPS, but that should no real blocker…

Regards,

Johannes Weskamm

···

Am 18.03.21 um 15:53 schrieb Andrea Aime:

Hi all,
as you know, the WPS download module is now a supported extension. The module provides
a good asynchronous animation building facility, which can be called in a asynchronous way and
generates MP4 movies.

Maybe not many know that WMS has an “animator”, which can build animated gifs:
https://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/tutorials/animreflector.html

It does not compare very well to the WPS download:

  1. Can only do synchronous requests
  2. It’s memory bound
  3. Normally limited to URL size (I guess one could do a form POST though, haven’t tried)
  4. Can only build animated GIFs (hence, relatively low compression)
  5. Can only work with local GeoServer layers (WPS download can do on the fly cascade as well)
    To be fair, it has one advantage over the WPS download, in that it can animate over any WMS
    request parameter, like changing the bbox, or a view param, while WPS download only over time.

I don’t think anyone is seriously using it (did you know it was there in the first place?), and given
its runtime limits and memory consumption, I’d suggest to just drop it. Only on the dev branch,
and we can include a warning in the 2.19.0 release announcement for eventual users to switch
to the WPS download.

Opinions??

Cheers
Andrea

*: well, almost superceded!

== GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A 55054 Massarosa (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it ------------------------------------------------------- Con riferimento alla normativa sul trattamento dei dati personali (Reg. UE 2016/679 - Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati “GDPR”), si precisa che ogni circostanza inerente alla presente email (il suo contenuto, gli eventuali allegati, etc.) è un dato la cui conoscenza è riservata al/i solo/i destinatario/i indicati dallo scrivente. Se il messaggio Le è giunto per errore, è tenuta/o a cancellarlo, ogni altra operazione è illecita. Le sarei comunque grato se potesse darmene notizia. This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. We remind that - as provided by European Regulation 2016/679 “GDPR” - copying, dissemination or use of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail.

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Hi,

Funny thing, i just discovered this endpoint again just now and found out that it does not work for “env” variables as advertised.

I tried various combinations of aparams=env and avalues=parameter:value1,parameter:value2 etc but none seems to be working.

I started to debug the code to find the issue, but it may be more future proof to checkout that download WPS.

I am not yet sure how good the old animate endpoint integrated into WMS clients, as it tends to be somewhat “GetMap” like.

So i guess it could be used in e.g. openlayers to request and draw those animated gifs on the map.

It was meant for a single time download, don’t think it was used in combination with an OpenLayers client.

I assume that this is getting more complicated with a WPS, but that should no real blocker…

Well if you need anything but time to drive the animation then the WPS won’t support it (yet).
At the same time, the animator has been sitting there without dedicated maintenance for a lot of time.

In this thread, I’m providing the work to remote it from the codebase. If you want to keep it instead, it would likely have to
be turned into a community module. Is it something you’d be interested in doing?

Cheers
Andrea

···

== GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A 55054 Massarosa (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it ------------------------------------------------------- Con riferimento alla normativa sul trattamento dei dati personali (Reg. UE 2016/679 - Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati “GDPR”), si precisa che ogni circostanza inerente alla presente email (il suo contenuto, gli eventuali allegati, etc.) è un dato la cui conoscenza è riservata al/i solo/i destinatario/i indicati dallo scrivente. Se il messaggio Le è giunto per errore, è tenuta/o a cancellarlo, ogni altra operazione è illecita. Le sarei comunque grato se potesse darmene notizia. This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. We remind that - as provided by European Regulation 2016/679 “GDPR” - copying, dissemination or use of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail.

Am 23.03.21 um 17:25 schrieb Andrea Aime:

Well if you need anything but time to drive the animation then the WPS
won't support it (yet).
At the same time, the animator has been sitting there without
dedicated maintenance for a lot of time.

Yeah, realized that in the meanwhile, but after looking at the code i
think its absolutely possible to extend the WPS plugin to handle any
parameter, not only time for the animation.

I also figured out that there is no easy way of rendering animated gifs
since openlayers is using the canvas renderer and abandoned the dom
renderer.

Using mp4 movies in openlayers is possible, but codewise not implemented
at all. So it was just wishful thinking from my side, sorry for confusion.

In this thread, I'm providing the work to remote it from the codebase.
If you want to keep it instead, it would likely have to
be turned into a community module. Is it something you'd be interested
in doing?

I think the WPS superseeds the old endpoint and you dont need to keep
it. I hope i will get some time to work on the download WPS to extend it.

Greetings,

Johannes

+1

···

On 2021-03-18 7:53 a.m., Andrea Aime wrote:

Hi all,
as you know, the WPS download module is now a supported extension. The module provides
a good asynchronous animation building facility, which can be called in a asynchronous way and
generates MP4 movies.

Maybe not many know that WMS has an “animator”, which can build animated gifs:
https://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/tutorials/animreflector.html

It does not compare very well to the WPS download:

  1. Can only do synchronous requests
  2. It’s memory bound
  3. Normally limited to URL size (I guess one could do a form POST though, haven’t tried)
  4. Can only build animated GIFs (hence, relatively low compression)
  5. Can only work with local GeoServer layers (WPS download can do on the fly cascade as well)
    To be fair, it has one advantage over the WPS download, in that it can animate over any WMS
    request parameter, like changing the bbox, or a view param, while WPS download only over time.

I don’t think anyone is seriously using it (did you know it was there in the first place?), and given
its runtime limits and memory consumption, I’d suggest to just drop it. Only on the dev branch,
and we can include a warning in the 2.19.0 release announcement for eventual users to switch
to the WPS download.

Opinions??

Cheers
Andrea

*: well, almost superceded!

== GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A 55054 Massarosa (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549 http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it ------------------------------------------------------- Con riferimento alla normativa sul trattamento dei dati personali (Reg. UE 2016/679 - Regolamento generale sulla protezione dei dati “GDPR”), si precisa che ogni circostanza inerente alla presente email (il suo contenuto, gli eventuali allegati, etc.) è un dato la cui conoscenza è riservata al/i solo/i destinatario/i indicati dallo scrivente. Se il messaggio Le è giunto per errore, è tenuta/o a cancellarlo, ogni altra operazione è illecita. Le sarei comunque grato se potesse darmene notizia. This email is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. We remind that - as provided by European Regulation 2016/679 “GDPR” - copying, dissemination or use of this e-mail or the information herein by anyone other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email by mistake, please notify us immediately by telephone or e-mail.

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