Geoserver 3 crowdfunding - help Geoserver to stay alive

Dead man...Dead man walking here.

I love Geoserver. Unfortunately, during my 15 odd years in GIS I have never seen any in a commercial environment, just heard about one or two installations at some higher governmental places (Geosciences Australia). During the early years of my GIS and Java career I was keen to explore Geoserver inside out, purely from professional interests so I played around with it a lot  (deploying/configurations/operations/REST-access, programming routines against WFS services, etc) and I was reasonably confident that - in those days - it was not very far from ArcGIS Server in many prospectives.

Stability was rock solid, all necessary spatial server features were there, good coding practices in source, security, IAM implementations, DB-support, etc. Documentations were scarce, but books were being released and everything seemed that this is going to be another, global open-source success - like QGIS.

But that is the past. Whilst Geoserver is still there and still as good as it was before - yet it sorts of run out of the steam in terms of keeping it up with the pace of the server-side/cloud market - I suppose they did not have or wanting to have a concrete product strategy enabling them to settle on a more established level of commerce. Maybe they just wanted to keep Geoserver as a reference implementation of OGC standards and not worried about becoming a commercial success. I don't know, this is just how I feel about it - I might be wrong. But this is my blog and this is my opinion :). I still love the product. It is good. Really good.

Beggars can't be choosers

Regardless of these - for my utmost surprise I just noticed that they are crowdfunding for their next release - which is pretty much just a major maintenance release (Spring 6 / JDK17 upgrades). along with some re-plugging the image management system with a more performant library - which is good. I think there will be a Wicket upgrade too. But that is all. 

As far as I know a little bit of the open-source world - these major maintenance releases for established open-source products - well - not sure how to say it - but you don't need or should not have a need for crowdfunding. It's normally being done by the core Development team - and/or their sponsors should assist them as needed. Obviously - Geoserver funding strategy might just be an exception to the rule.

Still, I believe that you start crowdfunding to deliver and support some extra features, something new or revolutionary or both - that will give you more opportunities on a long run so you can give it back to those who supported you. I mean - the ImageN toolkit might be more performant than the previous one and surely there will be some new things in Spring 6 vs Spring 5...but still...for me it really seems like that things have not been going to the right direction behind the scenes at Geoserver and nowadays they are happy to take individual/non-corporate sponsorships as well from interested individuals to deliver their next major release....FROM INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS!

Not companies, not government institutions using Geoserver - but individuals like you and me. That is, I feel a bit too much - or let's say a little bit of a hit below the belt. Especially nowadays when inflation is way more than it is presented. Being said that - the Geoserver guys do point it out on their site that majority of the support is from companies and not from individuals. 

What I am trying to say - if you are a Java developer and want to contribute - please speak to the guys and/or have a look on their JIRA and get involved. If you have a company and you are making money from Geoserver or other OS GIS product - please contribute and help them, you have been making money using these products for free anyway - ok, minus the time and money you spent on your own or your team's effort on debugging, looking for workarounds, trying to figure out some undocumented features/etc/etc.

But if you are neither - please spend your hard-earned money on your family/friends/yourself/on your life/on your entertainment and let OGC and the Geoserver management team along with their professional partners to deal with their own problems. And since this is a corporate matter there is really no reason to ask or accept money from private individuals for such work on such product like Geoserver. 

On the other hand, there is no reason not to accept donations from individuals to use Geoserver - for example QGIS always prompts you to donate if you want whenever you download their lates release. But that is not the same thing - you donate if you want - the product in any case will be maintained, supported and looked after so anyone can use it. Whether the user donates or not - QGIS will be there and you can use it for free.

But if the situation is this dire with Geoserver that they resort to such funding stream for a work like this - well then what is the point of doing this Geoserver 3 release at all? Will the next major upgarde/major maintenance release be easier in Geoserver 4? Is there any new feature coming up now that will be pushing up the usage of the product to a more viable level? I don't know the answer for these, I have zero insight into any of the related future plans. 

You can access Geoserver site using the link here: Geoserver

ArcGIS Diagrammer official documentation free download

Sometimes its a bit difficult to find old, official documentations - but luckily I have just came across with ArcGIS Diagrammer doco's from ESRI in PDF. I uploaded it to my personal AWS drive as these files can easily come and go from and to sites, old websites disappear, etc.

You can download it here:

ArcGIS Diagrammer Official Documentation

Postgres table with geographic data - migration commands

 First let's export a table to the file system:

pg_dump --host localhost --port 5432 --username mypgusername --format plain --verbose --file /var/lib/pgsql/stations.sql --table mypgschamename.mypgtablename mydatabasename

Now we have a sql file on filesystem - ready to be migrated.

We can do that even for a remote PG server:

psql -h 111.111.111.111 -p 5432 -d mydbname -U myusername -W -f stations.sql

After putting  in the password for the remote server the restore takes place over the wire.

On WAN network it might be slow and can disconnect occasionally - I'd say several hundred of MB table still can easily be restored like this.

Mapcortex.com new website

In the last few years/months we have been trying to formulate our new business strategy - and we seemingly get to the point where we can safely say we have some good ideas to implement.

Our new website layout is now trying to correspond to this endeavour. So if you like to see what we are up to these days please visit mapcortex.com.

SQL Server Spatial Data type in Console Application using C#

This is the lates issue I have come accross with. The Microsoft.SqlServer.Types spatial library doens't seem to playing well in Console and Desktop C# applications - they do work ok in Web Applications though.

My workaround is to use the 10.50.1600.1 version of the dll.

arcpy.Copy_management misses out database schemas from path

 This is what I have just encountered today. When I add the second parameter to the arcpy.Copy_management toolbox the actual filename must not contain point characters (which is related to schema names). 

So for instance, if you try to copy a mosaic dataset from r"d:\SDEConnections\myconnection.sde\super.data.mymosaic_dataset" to a location of r"d:\tempfgdb\super.data.mymosaic_dataset" after running this toolbox you will end up with a copied mosaic dataset in your destination but without schmea names - in this case this would be r"d:\tempfgdb\mymosaic_dataset".

Solution/workaround is - don't try to copy schema names. 

Where is Create ArcSDE Connection File toolbox gone from ArcMap 10.8.1?

Good question, isn't it? ESRI decided that you will not be able to connect to an ArcSDE instance from ArcMap 10.7 onwards. Its a way too old architecture, so it should be revised and deprecated in favour of the same product that is wrapped into a different framework. 

ITs a bit of a shame if your corporate architecture has multiple running instances - seems like you will be spending a lot of money to replace this if you want to enable users to connect to the database via this engine.

What is going to be the next ESRI? Deprecating the database connection tools only allowing your fancy cloud datastore or something similar? Or even better - no database conenction should be allowed from ESRI at all!!! Either you connect to a ArcGIS service or buzz off. 

Now you have to pay me for this good idea...