OMS3 Grass modules Wrapper at Prague GRASS-Hackfest

Last week I took part at the GRASS Community Sprint. As every sprint I took part at, it has been an amazing experience and it has been good to catch up with "old" grass developers I knew and to get introduced to some really great "new" developers.

At the sprint I wanted to wrap all the grass modules in an OMS3/jgrasstools wrapper. Well, I had only two days to code on it, so I am not exactly where I wanted to, but lot's of stuff is already working and I can show you some stuff already loaded in the OmsBox:

Running r.watershed from within uDig:



And the result:



If you want to know what OMS3, jgrasstools and the omsbox are, you are invited to have a look at the presentation I gave at the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2011.

While in the screenshots you can see the modules inside the OmsBox (just so it looks nice), the result is a very small java package that depends on no big library or toolbox, so that the whole java world can take advantage of this. Amen!


I would also like to thank personally the sponsors that helped out:
GFOSS.it Associazione Italiana per l'Informazione Geografica Libera
Stefan Sylla, sylla-consult, Frankfurt, Germany
R3 GIS, Merano, Italy
FOSSGIS e.V., D-A-CH

rst2pdf for presentations: installations and svg usage

Lately I tried out reST after a hint of good man Paolo Corti.

After some startup problems I am now really satified with the results. Amazing over all the possibility to embed svg files instead of images. My diagrams now really rock!

Not being a Python guy I had some problems to install rst2pdf. Well, in linux it is easy like:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-virtualenv
sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib python-scitools
sudo easy_install rst2pdf
and the dev file if they are not installed already sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev

but in windows I had several problems with error messages. I will have to try again and update here the procedure.

When using svg images, I was getting missleading errors which then got solved by running with the -e inkscape switch.

rst2pdf -s 2011_05_19_Geoinformatics_FCE_CTU.style -e inkscape 2011_05_19_Geoinformatics_FCE_CTU.rst

Yes Martin, the first presentation done with reST is for you :)


-------------------
UPDATE 2011/10/06

The workflow to install rst2pdf on a windows machine was the following:

- install python 2.7.2 (for 32 bits for God's sake!!!)
- follow http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#windows
- (install mingw???)
- easy_install.exe PIL
- easy_install.exe rst2pdf
- install inkscape

I wasn't able to install matplotlib so that it would work in rst2pdf on windows up to this point.


-------------------
UPADTE 2012/11/12

Just installed rst2pdf again and got this error:

  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.

framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rst2pdf-0.92-py2.7.egg/rst2pdf/styles.py", line 527, in __init__
    reportlab.platypus.tables.CellStyle1.fontname=self['base'].fontName
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'CellStyle1'

And found the fix ready in the tracker:

 

And indeed it has no such attribute. Changing line 527 to refer to CellStyle.fontname (no numeral 1) fixed the problem.

UPDATE 2011/09/02

Due to a strange docutils-python mismatch, rst2pdf is no longer working for me, because one of the used functions changed signature.

The error I get is:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/usr/local/bin/rst2pdf", line 9, in 

    load_entry_point('rst2pdf==0.16', 'console_scripts', 'rst2pdf')()

  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.16-py2.7.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py", line 1452, in main

    numbered_links=options.numbered_links,

  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.16-py2.7.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py", line 169, in __init__

    get_language (self.language)

TypeError: get_language() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)

The solutions was given by the author of rst2pdf and consists in opening the file createpdf.py (which in my case is in

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rst2pdf-0.16-py2.7.egg/rst2pdf/createpdf.py

) and add at line 66 (right below the line

from docutils.transforms import Transform

) the following lines:

import docutils

if docutils.__version__ >= '0.8':

    orig_func = get_language

    def get_language(arg1):

        return orig_func(arg1, None)

The first release of jgrasstools is out

The first official release of JGrasstools has been released as 0.7.0.

We have worked about a year to prepare not only the algorithms contained in this release, but also the supporting the evolution of the OMS3 framework to gain the main objective of the JGrasstools library: the possibility to link together models in a most possible flexible way, being it along a timeline or in standalone mode, being it in complex and recursive way or in simple standalone mode.

JGrasstools represents the effort to extract the processing power of JGrass to library level.

For documentation, downloads, you can read the whole story at the release notes page.

NetTools 1.0.0 in Osgeo4W flush

We have been working on the nettools for udig a while now. The aim is to have tools to handle water supply systems and stromwater networks.

Well the first part is out. Epanet inside uDig for water supply systems.

It gives the possibility to create networks inside the GIS



And has wizards to run simulations



It has also been used in developing countries already, for planning and training purposes



Guess what is missing as usual? The manual... I really hope someone gets that one done. Downside is that for now the tools have to be used by trying them and asking for help in the udig mailinglist.

For now the nettools are available in the Osgeo4W installer.