Hi,
last week I participated to the Bolsena code sprint and
I would like to share the results I got on WPS.
Unfortunately they are nothing close to what I planned,
partly because I spent more time than I though fighting
with Wicket, and partly because between presentations
and talks with other project people about various
topics the useful time to actually develop something
was reduced to 3 days.
Anyways, managed to brush up once more with the WPS
spec and hopefully made it so that working just on
hooking up processes does not require a full spec
read in the future.
In the attachemnt you can see screenshots from the
embedded WPS client I've developed.
The tool, linked from the demo page, provides a
drop down listing all the available processes
(GetCapabilities), when a process is selected
all the inputs and outputs are shown, along with
their description and an appropriate editor
(DescribeProcess), once the inputs are filled
it's possible to either invoke the process and
get the results in a popup or have the Execute
request xml be generated and displayed.
This should be helpful to get people started, as well
as provide a source of request templates for whoever
want to use the WPS from their own custom applications.
During the sprint I added two new input/output formats,
wkt for geometries and image/tiff for coverages.
The former should be deal with as a CDATA section, whilst
the other should be usable inline when base64 encoded
(did not test the latter).
As you can see from the screenshots I had some success
running various vector processes, whilst for raster ones
I was still fiddling and fighting when the week finished.
In any case, I can confirm that grabbing coverages from
the internal WCS works, and you can see how that works
in one of the screenshots (rasterConvert-nq8.png).
When grabbing layers from the server the tool provides
a friendly drop down listing the available layers and
then encodes that choice into a WFS/WCS request.
I plan to add a bit more control to that in the
future, so that the user can also choose which attribute
to pass the process and add a filter.
Now, the code I have right now cannot be committed because
I'm missing a couple of reviews in gt2 land, but hopefully
I'll manage by the end of the week and everybody will be able
to play with the WPS improvements.
When I do so I also plan to add the WPS service as a community
download in nightly builds. A bit for care and development and
I guess we can start pushing it for extension status.
Cheers
Andrea
--
Andrea Aime
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.
(attachments)
