Tag: gis

Strategic partnership agreement between Oslandia and OpenGIS.ch on QField

Who are we?

🤔 For those unfamiliar with Oslandia, OpenGIS.ch, or even QGIS, let’s refresh your memory:

👉 Oslandia is a French company specializing in open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Since our establishment in 2009, we have been providing consulting, development, and training services in GIS, with reknown expertise. Oslandia is a dedicated open-source player and the largest contributor to the QGIS solution in France.

👉 As for OPENGIS.ch, they are a Swiss company specializing in the development of open-source GIS software. Founded in 2011, OPENGIS.ch is the largest Swiss contributor to QGIS. OPENGIS.ch is the creator of QField, the most widely used open-source mobile GIS solution for geomatics professionals.

OPENGIS.ch also offers QFieldCloud as a SaaS or on-premise solution for collaborative field project management.

😲 Some may still be unfamiliar with #QGIS ?

It is a free and open-source Geographic Information System that allows creating, editing, visualizing, analyzing, and publicating geospatial data. QGIS is a cross-platform software that can be used on desktops, servers, as a web application, or as a development library.

QGIS is open-source software developed by multiple contributors worldwide. It is an official project of the OpenSource Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and is supported by the QGIS.org association. See https://qgis.org

A Partnership?

🎉 Today, we are delighted to announce our strategic partnership aimed at strengthening and promoting QField, the mobile application companion of QGIS Desktop.

🌟 This partnership between Oslandia and OPENGIS.ch is a significant step for QField and open-source mobile GIS solutions. It will consolidate the platform, providing users worldwide with simplified access to effective tools for collecting, managing, and analyzing geospatial data in the field.

📱 QField, developed by OPENGIS.ch, is an advanced open-source mobile application that enables GIS professionals to work efficiently in the field, using interactive maps, collecting real-time data, and managing complex geospatial projects on Android, iOS, or Windows mobile devices.

↔ QField is cross-platform, based on the QGIS engine, facilitating seamless project sharing between desktop, mobile, and web applications.

🕸 QFieldCloud (https://qfield.cloud), the collaborative web platform for QField project management, will also benefit from this partnership and will be enhanced to complement the range of tools within the QGIS platform.

Reactions

❤ At Oslandia, we are thrilled to collaborate with OPENGIS.ch on QGIS technologies. Oslandia shares with OPENGIS.ch a common vision of open-source software development: a strong involvement in development communities, work in respect with the ecosystem, an highly skilled expertise, and a commitment to industrial-quality, robust, and sustainable software development.

👩‍💻 With this partnership, we aim to offer our clients the highest expertise across all software components of the QGIS platform, from data capture to dissemination.

🤝 On the OpenGIS.ch side, Marco Bernasocchi adds:

The partnership with Oslandia represents a crucial step in our mission to provide leading mobile GIS tools with a genuine OpenSource credo. The complementarity of our skills will accelerate the development of QField and QFieldCloud and meet the growing needs of our users.

Commitment to open source

🙏 Both companies are committed to continue supporting and improving QField and QFieldCloud as open-source projects, ensuring universal access to this high-quality mobile GIS solution without vendor dependencies.

Ready for field mapping ?

🌏 And now, are you ready for the field?

So, download QField (https://qfield.org/get), create projects in QGIS, and share them on QFieldCloud!

✉ If you need training, support, maintenance, deployment, or specific feature development on these platforms, don’t hesitate to contact us. You will have access to the best experts available: [email protected].

 

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Create a QGIS vector data provider in Python is now possible

 

Why python data providers?

My main reasons for having Python data provider were:

  • quick prototyping
  • web services
  • why not?

 

This topic has been floating in my head for a while since I decided to give it a second look and I finally implemented it and merged for the next 3.2 release.

 

How it’s been done

To make this possible I had to:

  • create a public API for registering the providers
  • create the Python bindings (the hard part)
  • create a sample Python vector data provider (the boring part)
  • make all the tests pass

 

First, let me say that it wasn’t like a walk in the park: the Python bindings part is always like diving into woodoo and black magic recipes before I can get it to work properly.

For the Python provider sample implementation I decided to re-implement the memory (aka: scratch layers) provider because that’s one of the simplest providers and it does not depend on any external storage or backend.

 

How to and examples

For now, the main source of information is the API and the tests:

To register your own provider (PyProvider in the snippet below) these are the basic steps:

metadata = QgsProviderMetadata(PyProvider.providerKey(), PyProvider.description(), PyProvider.createProvider)
QgsProviderRegistry.instance().registerProvider(metadata)

To create your own provider you will need at least the following components:

  • the provider class itself (subclass of QgsVectorDataProvider)
  • a feature source (subclass of QgsAbstractFeatureSource)
  • a feature iterator (subclass of QgsAbstractFeatureIterator)

Be aware that the implementation of a data provider is not easy and you will need to write a lot of code, but at least you could get some inspiration from the existing example.

 

Enjoy wirting data providers in Python and please let me know if you’ve fond this implementation useful!

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Welcome QGIS 3 and bye bye Madeira

Last week I’ve been in Madeira at the hackfest, like all the past events this has been an amazing happening, for those of you who have never been there, a QGIS hackfest is typically an event where QGIS developers and other pasionate contributors like documentation writers, translators etc. gather together to discuss the future of their beloved QGIS software. QGIS hackfest are informal events where meetings are scheduled freely and any topic relevant to the project can be discussed. This time we have brought to the table some interesting topics like:
  • the future of processing providers: should they be part of QGIS code or handled independently as plugins?
  • the road forward to a better bug reporting system and CI platform: move to gitlab?
  • the certification program for QGIS training courses: how (and how much) training companies should give back to the project?
  • SWOT analysis of current QGIS project: very interesting discussion about the status of the project.
  • QGIS Qt Quick modules for mobile QGIS app
Tehre were also some mentoring sessions where I presented:
  • How to set up a development environment and make your first pull request
  • How to write tests for QGIS (in both python and C++)
  At this link you can find all the video recordings of the sessions: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/wiki/DeveloperMeetingMadeira2018   Here is a link to the Vagrant QGIS developer VM I’ve prepared for the session: https://github.com/elpaso/qgis-dev-vagrant/   I’ve got a good feedback from other devs about my sessions and I’m really happy that somebody found them useful, one of the main goals of a QGIS hackfest should really be to help other developers to ramp up quicly into the project. Other than that, I’ve also find the time to update to QGIS 3.0 some of my old plugins like GeoCoding and QuickWKT.   Thanks to Giovanni Manghi and to Madeira Government for the organizazion and thanks to all QGIS sponsors and donors!   About me: I started as a QGIS plugin author, continued as the developer of the plugin official repository at https://plugins.qgis.org and now I’m one of the top 5 QGIS core contributors. After almost 10 years that I’m in the QGIS project I’m now not only a proud member of the QGIS community but also an advocate for the open source GIS software movement.
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Building QGIS master with Qt 5.9.3 debug build

Building QGIS from sources is not hard at all on a recent linux box, but what about if you wanted to be able to step-debug into Qt core or if you wanted to build QGIS agains the latest Qt release? Here things become tricky. This short post is about my experiments to build Qt and and other Qt-based dependencies for QGIS in order to get a complete debugger-friendly build of QGIS.   Start with downloading the latest Qt installer from Qt official website: https://www.qt.io/download-qt-for-application-development choose the Open Source version.   Now install the Qt version you want to build, make sure you check the Sources and the components you might need. Whe you are done with that, you’ll have your sources in a location like /home/user/Qt/5.9.3/Src/ To build the sources, you can change into that directory and issue the following command – I assume that you have already installed all the dependencies normally needed to build C++ Qt programs – I’m using clang here but feel free to choose gcc, we are going to install the new Qt build into /opt/qt593.
./configure -prefix /opt/qt593 -debug -opensource -confirm-license -ccache -platform linux-clang
When done, you can build it with
make -j9
sudo make install
  To build QGIS you also need three additional Qt packages   QtWebKit from https://github.com/qt/qtwebkit (you can just download the zip): Extract it somewhere and build it with
/opt/qt593/bin/qmake WebKit.pro
make -j9
sudo make install
  Same with QScintila2 from https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/qscintilla
/opt/qt593/bin/qmake qscintilla.pro
make -j9
sudo make install
  QWT is also needed and it can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/qwt/files/qwt/6.1.3/ but it requires a small edit in qwtconfig.pri before you can build it: set QWT_INSTALL_PREFIX = /opt/qt593_libs/qwt-6.1.3 to install it in a different folder than the default one (that would possibly overwrite a system install of QWT). The build it with:
/opt/qt593/bin/qmake qwt.pro
make -j9
sudo make install
  If everything went fine, you can now configure Qt Creator to use this new debug build of Qt: start with creating a new kit (you can probably clone a working Qt5 kit if you have one). What you need to change is the Qt version (the path to cmake) to point to your brand new Qt build,: Pick up a name and choose the Qt version, but before doing that you need to click on Manage… to create a new one: Now you should be able to build QGIS using your new Qt build, just make sure you disable the bindings in the CMake configuration: unfortunately you’d also need to build PyQt in order to create the bindings.   Whe QGIS is built using this debug-enabled Qt, you will be able to step-debug into Qt core libraries! Happy debugging!  
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Essen 2017 QGIS Hackfest

Another great QGIS hackfest is gone, and it’s time for a quick report. The location was the Linux Hotel, one of the best places where open source developers could meet, friendly, geek-oriented and when the weather is good, like this time, villa Vogelsang is a wonderful place to have a beer in the garden while talking about software development or life in general. This is a short list of what kept me busy during the hackfest:
  • fixed some bugs and feature requests on the official QGIS plugin repo that I’m maintaining since the very beginning
  • make the QGIS official plugin repository website mobile-friendly
  • QGIS Server Python Plugin API refactoring, I’ve completed the work on the new API, thanks to the ongoing server refactoring it’s now much cleaner than it was in the first version
  • attribute table bugs: I started to address some nasty bugs in the attribute table, some of those were fixed during the week right after the hackfest
  • unified add layer button, we had a productive meeting where we decided the path forward to implement this feature, thanks to Boundless that is funding the development, this feature is what’s I’m currently working on these days
Thanks to all QGIS donors and funders that made yet another great hackfest possible and in particular to Boundless Spatial Inc. for funding my personal expenses.    
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