http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2010/09/16/spatialite-is-not-the-shapefile-of-the-future/
In this case SpatiaLite is dying a slow death because no one is actually
implementing it. Now yes OGR, FDO and other libraries support it, but you
don’t see that making its way into mainline software (QGIS aside, but even
its support is poor) and in turn you rarely see it in the real world.
Offhand I can only think of the “beta” format that GeoCommons has on their
service (and they’ve had beta attached to it for almost a year).
Now yes, I think we all need a better format than the venerable shapefile
(and it’s three amigos) which as a transmission format fails miserably. But
there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this is a problem people
actually want solved. I’ve seen much more effort put into KML, GeoJSON and
LAS by the community than SpatiaLite or even SQLite. This isn’t because the
SpatiaLite project hasn’t given tools to us to implement, it has been the
community could care less about it. SHP works for them and there isn’t any
reason to change.
So what is going to change things? Well it will be web services, not GIS
formats that matter for users moving forward. So I say lets stop focusing
on SpatiaLite as a consumer format and actually work harder at making
better web services for these users (like stop it already with the WxS
please). SpatiaLite still has its place in the world, but does anyone
really want to bother downloading GIS files anymore? Of course not…
