North River Geographic Systems Inc

Geospatial Problem Solving

desktop

OpenJump 1.8

As I tell everyone these days - don’t limit yourself to just one tool.

I was introduced to this one some years ago and it hasn’t really been until recently I’ve started “re-exploring” OpenJump. I spend a lot of time talking about QGIS and other things (and I have more other things to talk about).  So 1.8 was released back in December 2014. I’ve been playing with this release as a front end to postgis/postgresql.

For those of you who were (are) still fans of the old ArcView 3.x release – we’ve got multiple windows. I chuckle at how revolutionary that has gotten…again…after what…..20+ years?

From the OpenJump Wiki:

  • It is a Vector GIS that can read rasters as well
  • OpenJUMP is known to work on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms, but should work on any operating system that runs Java 1.5 or later.
  • It is not just another free demo viewer, but you can edit, save, analyze etc. with JUMP / OpenJUMP
  • It works, even with medium size datasets, and with professional touch
  • It provides a GIS API with a flexible plugin structure, so that new features are relatively easy to develope around the sound mapping platform.
  • It utilizes OGC standards like SFS, GML, WMS and WFS
  • It is already translated in English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portugese and Spanish. The translation in other languages is in progress.
  • ..and it is free (under the GPL license).

In short you can:

  • Do everything you would want to do in the way of buffering, clipping, and intersecting.
  • Perform Topology checks.
  • It has the Sextante Geoprocessing toolbox built in
  • Great amount of other editing/geoprocessing tools
  • Capability to extend functionality through plugins.

It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac….or is that OSX…..eh – whatever – it runs on about everything that Java will – because it’s Java Based.

I’ve been working the Intro to QGIS class in OpenJump:

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  1. Add a file using the “open folder” icon. Just hover your mouse over an icon to get a description.
  2. Right click on the layer and Change Styles to something more eye pleasing.
  3.  Go to Tools -> Analysis -> Buffer and You have a buffer (that you have to save to a physical file with “Save Dataset as….”

Note the formats you can save…notice the formats you can ingest: It’s all (mostly) OGC compliant. So if you do something worthwhile here you can dump it to QGIS or ArcGIS.

Things to also note:

  • It will print – but you’re not going to make the next cartographic masterpiece
  • I crashed it a couple of times on Ubuntu adding imagery, Haven’t tried it on Windows 7 yet.
  • Reprojecting requires a plugin – so make sure all your data is in the correct projection
  • It works in a “grouping” type of layout. Anything you do processing wise will go under a group (like System) and will require you to save it.

Anyway – expose yourself to something new. Gain some flexibility. Download OpenJump and play around with it. You might find it useful.

 

 

 

ArcMap won’t kill off ArcInfo Workstation

If I remember correctly I was in Knoxville and we had gotten the first look at ArcMap 8.0. It’s been too many years ago to care or to count – I just remember sitting there going “Dammit – I spent all this time learning AML and Avenue”. The word being passed around as I remember it was ArcMap was the beginning stages of killing off ArcView 3.x. ArcView had made tremendous in roads and had pretty much became the go to standard for all my clients when I worked for TVA. Workstation was safe. I loved workstation. For all it’s command line craziness I knew one thing – if someone said they were using workstation they had a clue as to what they were doing. One of the managers with strong ties back to Redlands said during the class “This will kill off workstation”.

As time went on – Workstation on Unix slowly moved to Workstation for NT. ArcMap turned up in the office slowly around 2001 when XP finally appeared. Eventually I opened workstation less and less as coverages were replaced with shapefiles and shapefiles were pushed into a geodatabase. Eventually we moved into SDE which killed off a beautiful workflow we had set up with ArcINFO workstation. We started hearing about pushing maps into 3-D and onto the web. I still hear about pushing maps into 3-D and the web.

For the last year I’ve watched ArcGISOnline creep into everything. It’s not a bad thing – but I don’t really consider it a great thing. Call me your crazy uncle who turns up to thanksgiving late in a rusted out jeep, but I’m still not convinced the data is secure. I will say the same for any “cloud” environment in which you don’t hold the kill switch.

So anyway – I spent the morning reading up on ArcGISPro. Watching videos. I started having flashbacks. ArcWorkstation won’t be replaced. Arcview is safe. Deprecation. Will Arcmap run with workstation….Will ArcGISPro run with Arcmap….

I won’t even get into 3D.

For the record – it may take a few years but I consider this the preliminary announcement for the end ArcGIS for Desktop. The desktop platform has gotten stale. This is it. The next “revolution” will be ArcGISPro. Still with the tiered licensing from what I can figure out. “Hi you’ve just purchased ArcGIS Profesional Basic for Desktop”.

Innovation is great. Getting ESRi into 64bit for the desktop has long been overdue mainly because I still consider Desktop to have too much 80/90’s workstation core at it’s heart. You have to rewrite it to get rid of it. If you are going to rewrite it you might as well start killing off the old product line. Software changes and it’s not a bad thing….but – there’s a lot of “transformational” talk during this video.  Which usually means transforming your budget also.

It’s worth the watch – if only to remember the palm springs demo that was rolled out for years. I do miss the palm springs demo.