Wednesday FOSS4G Update

I'm very glad I attended Bastian Schaeffer's presentation about the 52N WPS. They are doing almost everything exactly right: a DSL for defining processes (BPEL in their case), user-defined and uploaded processes (what they call transactional WPS), and they seem to get what would be the RESTful way to do this stuff (I need to resume the discussion we were having about asychronous processing and callbacks). But it's still WPS, and not really for the web.

I got a glow-in-the-dark Ultrastar (Discraft's ultimate disc) with a TOPP hot-stamp from Chris Holmes. Reminds me how much I miss ultimate tournaments.

Alexander Quinn demonstrated a Library of Congress mapping application based on OpenLayers, MapServer, and Django (there's more Python here than in previous years) with smartly designed popups and labeling hacks.

Jan Hartmann is teaching ~~Belgian~~ Dutch villagers how to georeference historical maps and help tell the story of the invasions and occupations of his hometown since the 17th century.

Aimee Stewart is doing ecological niche modeling on the web with Python (yet again) and RESTful web services instead of SOAP.

Camptocamp is switching from PHP and mapscript to a javascript framework based on OpenLayers and Dojo for CartoWeb 4. Pierre Giraud's demo used services implemented with Pylons (yet more Python). I must find out how well CartoWeb 4 fits into Zope page templates. Shapely has had a bunch of contributions from his colleague Frédéric Junod.

The conference wifi melted down this morning, but the event is otherwise running well.