[Geoserver-users] GeoServer development effort

GeoServer GeoServer User
1

Hi,

I have successfully set up and used GeoServer (very easy). My
organization is now considering a ground-up, in-house development of an
OGC-compliant WFS. I was wondering how long it took (developer hours)
to get GeoServer to its current state? I'm assuming you spent vast
amounts of time designing, developing, testing and documenting, but I'd
like to get a more quantitative value to give to my management.

thanks,
M.
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2

Hi,

That is a pretty hard question to answer :), but a darn good one. Well... lets see, GeoServer was started (initially as just a WFS) in about 2001. Activity on the project has sort of been up and down from time to time. I would say up until around 2006 an average of two developers working full time (40 hours a week). This is not to say that at times over that time period there we not many more developers working... just that I would think that is what it would average out.

However, from 2006 until now development has stepped up. At any time during that time period there have between 2 - 6 developers working full time on geoserver. With about another half dozen "casually" contributing.

So not sure how useful that is as an estimate. One thing that might be of use to you is http://www.ohloh.net/p/3404. It contains various metrics for the project.

Also of interest may be http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOS, the bug tracker, which you could use to gather various metrics about how many bug fixes and releases have been performed over the years.

Hope that helps. I am sure others who have been with the project longer than I can probably give you better estimates... but there it is.

-Justin

milestg@anonymised.com wrote:

Hi,

I have successfully set up and used GeoServer (very easy). My
organization is now considering a ground-up, in-house development of an
OGC-compliant WFS. I was wondering how long it took (developer hours)
to get GeoServer to its current state? I'm assuming you spent vast
amounts of time designing, developing, testing and documenting, but I'd
like to get a more quantitative value to give to my management.

thanks,
M.

--
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.

3

Also another thing to consider is the value of the user community. With GeoServer, like many other open source projects, the true value is in the community... and not so much the code.

Users who have spent countless hours reporting bugs, submitting patches, and helping each other out on the mailing list should not be overlooked. That of course is a much harder metric to come up with.

milestg@anonymised.com wrote:

Hi,

I have successfully set up and used GeoServer (very easy). My
organization is now considering a ground-up, in-house development of an
OGC-compliant WFS. I was wondering how long it took (developer hours)
to get GeoServer to its current state? I'm assuming you spent vast
amounts of time designing, developing, testing and documenting, but I'd
like to get a more quantitative value to give to my management.

thanks,
M.

--
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.

4

To sum up to Justin's email,

I as developer know very well how exciting is when you feel brave and ready to
start a big project from scratch, feeling you can do it far far better than
that other one with all those bugs and things you think may be done a lot
better.
The thing with geoserver and other OS projects is that they already rock
(GeoServer in particular does), are build around a strong user and developers
community which proved to be the keystone for long term project success, no
matter if you loose a star developer, there's always very skilled people
willing to contribute. There are countless years of knowledge, proof and
error, bugs fixed put into the product that you'll be saving by joining and
existing successful project. There's just too much to contribute yet to such
a successful project where all that braveness can be really make a difference
instead of reinventing the wheel, and you'll peer up with great people and
grow up as developer by learning from others and learning to play in a
descentralized, concensus based community pushing for the success of the
project...
so, why not joining a community, geoserver, mapserver, deegree, you choose,
instead of going through all the pain of kicking off such a difficult project
from scratch?
I can't think of a strong enough reason that may stop one from doing so. You
may find the license is not the one you want or any other "minor" impediment,
but I don't think there's one strong enough that cannot be solved with less
effort than building everything yourself.

My 2c.-

Gabriel

On Friday 23 January 2009 17:27:54 Justin Deoliveira wrote:

Also another thing to consider is the value of the user community. With
GeoServer, like many other open source projects, the true value is in
the community... and not so much the code.

Users who have spent countless hours reporting bugs, submitting patches,
and helping each other out on the mailing list should not be overlooked.
That of course is a much harder metric to come up with.

milestg@anonymised.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have successfully set up and used GeoServer (very easy). My
> organization is now considering a ground-up, in-house development of an
> OGC-compliant WFS. I was wondering how long it took (developer hours)
> to get GeoServer to its current state? I'm assuming you spent vast
> amounts of time designing, developing, testing and documenting, but I'd
> like to get a more quantitative value to give to my management.
>
>
> thanks,
> M.

--
Gabriel Roldan
OpenGeo - http://www.opengeo.org