Hi all,
just a quick note for other Geoserver developers.
Yesterday I held a 5 hours Geoserver seminar in Como,
which an audience you cannot find all days, that is,
university teachers and researchers, with deep expertise
in geomatics and GIS in general, and big users of GRASS,
MapServer and QGIS, among the others.
So, I'm going to publish the slides soon (they're in italian,
beware), but in the meantime, some little feedback from
this exceptional audience.
The good:
* nice that Geoserver is taking seriously tiled rendering
issues and tiling map server
* they were quite impressed by the forecoming versioning
capabilities
* wfs-t worked like a charm, nice to see various tools
hit toghter the same data service and have all kind of
attributes be modified (kind of refreshing compared to
other system where you can modify only non spatial
attributes)
* again, good impressions on wcs pyramid capaibilities and
the completeness of our OGC standards implementations
The bad:
* no way to configure which feature types can be edited
* no built-in authentication system, and a way to limit
who can edit specific feature types. Other requested an
ability to filter data that can be seen depending on
the user role (by this I mean an implicit filter applied
to GetFeature depending on the role and the feature type
requested)
* not many input and output formats. Not surprisingly either,
since the audience is used to the richness provided by
GDAL and OGR (we should really set up an OGRDataStore)
The ugly:
* ugly user interface, too many steps to configure a simple
shapefile (login, back, datastore, featuretype, oh my,
typo in the path, back, again, submit, apply
* configuring a shapefile on 1.4.9 forced me to put it
into the data dir (fixed on both 1.4.x and 1.5.x)
* geoserver 1.5.x was not running due to incomplete jai
install and lack of time to download and fix it (was
already quite late)... ok, I fixed this today
Well, all in all the presentation was a very nice experience,
and I'd like to thank Maria for organizing it and bringing
in such a good audience.
Cheers
Andrea