Reintroducing the GIS and Python Software Laboratory
Comments on a recent post make me think it's time to reintroduce the GIS and Python Software Laboratory. It's a fairly pretentious name for what's little more than a wiki, an issue tracker, a couple of subversion repositories, and a few mailing lists, but a name that describes well what we're doing: experimenting with bringing GIS to the C Python platform, and bringing Python programming idioms and distribution mechanisms to GIS software. We're designing better APIs that feel natural to a Python programmer. We're designing interoperability around Python protocols. We're designing software that can deployed in the standard Python fashion, and also with new tools like virtualenv and pip. Software that's modular, letting users pay only for what they eat.
Using the same dining metaphor, the lab proposes to you the following a la carte menu:
Geojson: implementation of the GeoJSON 1.0 spec
OWSLib: making W*S suck less
Quadtree: quad-tree index for spatial data
Rtree: R*-tree indexes for spatial data
Shapely: easy access to the GEOS spatial primitives
WorldMill: easy access to vector data using OGR
Mix and match. Hack. Build your own stacks, or stack-busting apps. For projections see pyproj. Subscribing to a similar philosophy, it fits well with the GIS-Python packages.