PostGIS Mini Conference in Paris, France
There will be a PostGIS 1 Day mini conference in Paris June 23rd organized by Oslandia and Dalibo. For Details: PostGIS mini conference English Details and PostGIS mini conference French Details. Speaker submissions are due April 22nd. Main focus will be upcoming PostGIS 2.0 which gathering from newsgroup a lot of people are already bouncing around.
PGCon 2011 - Paul will make a show
Paul Ramsey (OpenGeo) will be speaking at PGCon 2011. PostGIS knows where you are? and everyone will know where Paul is too.
PostGIS 2.0 when?
All the new stuff coming in PostGIS 2.0, you can get a sense of from PostGIS 2.0 release notes.
The OSGEO C-Like tribe of which PostGIS is a member of had a nice code sprint in Montreal this month where Paul nailed down most of the issues he was having with 3D spatial index support so looks like we can look forward to that. Jeff Adams from Azavea took care of quite a few shapefile loader issues (shp2pgsql), and also added in many regression tests for shp2pgsql that we were sorely missing. Pierre Racine (University of Laval), David Zwarg (Azavea), and Jorge Arévalo (Deimos Space) (working remotely but definitely pitching in a lot) worked out some raster memory issues and improving ST_MapAlgebra. Olivier Courtin ironing out 3D serialization and handling of solids.
We haven't called feature freeze yet on PostGIS 2.0, but I would say most of the functionality you can expect is in place, but will undergo some more polishing. We aren't quite as disciplined as the PostgreSQL core group, but then again we are a much smaller group so can afford to be less disciplined. Such a discipline early on I think would be more stiffling than beneficial. It's still too early to tell if KNN GIST will make it, but sadly it's no where to be seen yet, much to the chagrin of some.
Raster is really kicking dust, people jumping in to contribute, memory leaks and so forth being macheted down. Some people already using it and we haven't even released 2.0 yet. That has been pretty exciting to see take shape and the excitement around it.
I'm also happy to see a lot of people on the User's list testing our Windows experimental builds. If only there was a windows build of PostgreSQL 9.1 newer than Alpha 1. We've been hesitant to build for newer since PostGIS we compile against the newer alphas gives strange errors on certain functions when used with 9.1 Alpha 1 VC builds. No we still don't have 64-bit Windows builds of PostGIS, but hope to focus on that after the book is completed. I think we will end up going the mingW64 route since VC sounds like it would be a great deal more effort with our current PostGIS toolchain.
Topology made a surprise showing as well with many many improvements from Sandro Santilli and Andrea Peri. Sandro also discovered the term 3D Topology. Once he calms down from the frightful thought, he may actually start working on that for the 2.1 release.
I've started to program in C again - tiptoeing anyway to work on ST_AsX3D output functionality and have really begun to smoke from the proverbial X3D pipe in preparation for HTML 5 enhancements. This work is funded by our new venture Arrival 3D for later use in our construction toolkits.
While 2D geometry and GIS has been fun, Augmenting that experience with 3D has been for a long time on my dream path. A true Post-GIS adventure. What comes after GIS? virtual space, the frontier you make of it. At least for me anyway. I'm also looking forward to getting back at least a tincy bit to my engineering roots.
What about PostGIS in Action book?
First of all I'm happy to report that we are closer to having book out, hmm how long have I been saying that? I am sad to report this has gone on for what feels like an eternity and I'm hoping in the end it will all be well worth the wait. It could be any day now (so we are told) for the final PDF E-book version, then a week or so after for the hard-copy (which has already started printing), and then not quite sure when the e-Pub, Mobi and other e-Book versions become available, but would guess a month or so after.
We got the final proof of the front and back cover, and all I can say is Ain't she pretty. She isn't quite the baby elepant with a unicorn horn and infrared eyes I hoped for, but she'll do this time around..
