I'm a big believer in GML, but not such a fan of XSLT. For many web applications, I want to bypass the transformation and directly get GIS features (whether by WFS or other service) as javascript objects. In PrimaGIS we are using JSON-RPC, and a data structure that is modeled after the GML simple features profile:

// feature collection
[
  // a feature
  {
    'id': 'aa1',
    'properties': {
      'name':     'Foo',
      'category': 1,
      ...
    }
  },
  ...
]

I'm curious if there are other programmers interested in a JSON simple features profile. The representation of non-geometry properties is obvious, but what about geometries? Is it better to aim at existing Javascript drawing APIs like WZ, or look to Canvas?

A while back I created an initial SWIG interface for GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source), focusing on Python. I have subsequently stepped off the SWIG train (they lost me during the big changes made at 1.3.28), but Charlie Savage is forging ahead. The focus is now on Ruby, but if SWIG's unified typemaps work as advertised, bindings for other languages should follow trivially.

One complication is that the GEOS C++ API is a moving target. If the new language bindings are derived literally (as I did originally) from a changing C++ API, your Ruby or Python scripts could be broken by new GEOS releases. This is the reason why I went with the C API for PCL's geometry module. I think Charlie will be able to tweak the SWIG interface to maintain a stable Ruby API, but this was something I found myself unwilling to do.

I have updated [version 0.3.1] pgscrubber.user.js to keep up with the Planet Geospatial URL change.

Update (Wed Jan 3 12:31:02 MST 2007): new version, see http://sgillies.net/blog/332.