OSGeo incubation - Geomajas

[tmitchell]

Hello,

with this email, the Geomajas project would like to officially apply to become an OSGeo incubation project. Attached to this mail, you will find the incubator application questionnaire as is required by the incubation process. If you should have questions regarding the questionnaire or regarding the project, feel free to ask.

We feel confident our project could make a fine addition to the already strong OSGeo brand, by providing a strong GIS application framework where, through OSGeo, we could emphasize on server-side integration with existing projects and technologies written in Java.

All further information regarding the Geomajas project can be found on the website: ​http://www.geomajas.org/

Hope to hear from you soon,

-- Pieter De Graef

GeoSparc nv. ​http://www.geosparc.com/

Sponsor of: ​http://www.geomajas.org/

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Project: Geomajas

1.Please provide the name and email address of the principal Project Owner.

Dirk Frigne: dirk.frigne@…

2.Please provide the names and emails of co-project owners (if any).

Pieter De Graef: pieter.degraef@… Jan De Moerloose: jan.demoerloose@…

3.Please provide the names, emails and entity affiliation of all official committers

Dirk Frigne: dirk.frigne@… Pieter De Graef: pieter.degraef@… Jan De Moerloose: jan.demoerloose@… Joachim Van Der Auwera: joachim@… An Buyle: an.buyle@… Oliver May: oliver.may@… Kristof Heirwegh: kristofh@…

4.Please describe your Project.

Name: Geomajas Url: ​http://www.geomajas.org/

Description (taken from the website): Geomajas is a free and open source GIS framework for building rich internet applications. It has sophisticated capabilities for displaying and managing geospatial information. It's modular design makes it easily extensible, while a client-server architecture guarantees endless scalability. The focus of Geomajas is to provide a platform for server-side integration of geospatial data, allowing multiple users to control and manage the data from within their own browsers. In essence, Geomajas provides a set of building blocks, from which the most complex GIS applications can easily be built.

5.Why is hosting at OSGeo good for your project?

Hosting at OSGeo provides better visibility for any project involved. As OSGeo grows more mature, so will its projects. The Geomajas team wishes to make use of the strong OSGeo brand while at the same time filling the current gap of a GIS application framework for the web. Currently a new front-end is being created using the GWT technology. This would allow anyone using Geomajas to build upon it, using only Java. As many other OSGeo projects are written in the same language, it is our hope to start up working relationships with other projects such as geotools and geoserver. This kind of cooperation would greatly increase overall product quality.

6.Type of application does this project represent(client, server, standalone, library, etc.):

Geomajas is a client-server GIS application framework for the web.

7.Please describe any relationships to other open source projects.

At the server-side Geomajas uses the following Open Source projects: GeoTools Hibernate / Hibernate Spatial (actually Hibernate Spatial was created for the Geomajas project) Spring (used in the modularity, configuration, command dispatching, ...) JTS (Java Topology Suite) iText (PDF print generation)

At the client-side Geomajas uses the Dojo toolkit.

Currently we are busy adding an extra “face” to the project based upon the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), where the client side will be based upon the SmartGWT (lgpl) widget library.

8.Please describe any relationships with commercial companies or products.

Currently the codebase in SVN is the property of Geosparc. Geosparc is a commercial company providing services for the Geomajas project, through a network of partners. It is our desire to include these partners into the decision making process in order to have as many people as possible contributing to the project.

9.Which open source license(s) will the source code be released under?

GNU Affero general public licence (AGPL) v3.

10.Is there already a beta or official release?

The 1.4 branch is the latest stable branch, 1.4.3 the latest stable release. The trunk contains the new modularized spring based approach and the GWT. A stable version of the new architecture (1.6.0) should arrive the first quarter of 2010.

11.What is the origin of your project (commercial, experimental, thesis or other higher education, government, or some other source)?

The first installment was a government project back in 2006. This was executed by a private company, called DFC, and the University of Leuven. This project was called geGIS, and was finished in the summer of 2007. Then DFC started rewriting the code through a series of web based GIS projects, calling it majas and eventually geomajas. December 2008, a new company was created (Geosparc) to commercially support the project, as it had reached enough maturity. Now it is time to make the next step and turn the project into a community driven project. To this end, a project steering committee is being set up (although we are still looking for an independent individual that can carry some weight)

12.Does the project support open standards? Which ones and to what extent? (OGC, w3c, etc.) Has the software been certified to any standard (CITE for example)? If not, is it the intention of the project owners to seek certification at some point?

Geomajas reads in OGC standards such as WMS and WFS. It is our intention to work further on this point (perhaps through the GeoTools project) to support more standards then we do now. As it becomes increasingly important, we wish to follow the inspire guidelines.

13.Is the code free of patents, trademarks, and do you control the copyright?

It is free of patents and trademarks. Geosparc controls the copyright.

14.How many people actively contribute (code, documentation, other?) to the project at this time?

7 people do so actively.

15.How many people have commit access to the source code repository?

8 (7 committers and 1 extra person that has full server access)

16.Approximately how many users are currently using this project?

At the moment all projects where Geomajas has been used are Belgian or European projects, although the first Australian project is now a fact.

17.What type of users does your project attract (government, commercial, hobby, academic research, etc.)?

The users usually are developers themselves, creating the applications for which geomajas is suitable (web based GIS applications). It is often used in the government sector, although the utility sector also uses it.

18.If you do not intend to host any portion of this project using the OSGeo infrastructure, why should you be considered a member project of the OSGeo Foundation?

Everything is negotiable. We were already considering using sourceforge for mailing lists, perhaps OSGeo would be a better choice here.

19.Does the project include an automated build and test?

The project is build using “Maven” (a popular Java build tool). The state of the project is constantly monitored by a continuous integration engine, called Hudson. This system creates a new build every hour (if there were commits). In the current trunk, the documentation has also been included in the Maven build cycle, guaranteeing up-to-date documentation that all committers can update.

20.What language(s) are used in this project? (C/Java/perl/etc)

The server has been written using Java, while the Dojo client uses JavaScript. Once the GWT face is ready, we could eliminate the JavaScript altogether. Of course, the Dojo face will still be supported, as there are people and companies using it, but we believe GWT will be the future, because Java has a much broader developer community then JavaScript (let alone developers adept at both java and JavaScript), and it has decent debugging and unit testing facilities, whereas JavaScript is difficult to test and debug.

21.What is the dominant written language (i.e. English, French, Spanish, German, etc) of the core developers?

Everyone currently working on it speaks both Dutch and English. The website and all documentation is written in English only though.

22.What is the (estimated) size of a full release of this project? How many users do you expect to download the project when it is released?

At the moment the project is not that well-known. Only since FOSS4G 2009 has it been put on the map. The month October 2009 saw 543 downloads from the maven repository. The 1.4 releases (bin) were 36MB. This does not include source code or documentation.

[pagameba]

I should have accepted this ticket a while ago, geomajas was accepted as an incubation project and I am the mentor.

[pagameba]

update, it was not accepted yet ... I need to motion it for acceptance.

[warmerdam]

The incubator has recommended the project for incubation to the board today with Paul Spencer as mentor.

[tmitchell]

Accepted into incubation!! Closing ticket.