Re: [HACKERS] Re: Geometric Data Type in PostgreSQL

Thomas Lockhart wrote:
>
> > I'm a geographic information systems (GIS) professional and a (home)
> > Linux user. After reading the documentation for the Geometric data
> > types in PostgreSQL, I'm excited about the possibilities. Are you
> > aware of any projects where the geometric data types in PostgreSQL are
> > being used as the basis of a GIS or mapping package?
>

I use it in applications for geographic purposes, not really as a basis
of standalone, general purpose GIS systems. Mostly what I use it for
is finding objects in a specific bounding box.

> > I'd like to know
> > if anyone's doing this and, if not, what development language would
> > you recommend for developing a mapping package using PostgreSQL.
>
> Hmm. That's a hard one to answer without knowing more. If you need
> compiled code, then C or C++ might be the best choice. But you might
> find something like java or itcl lets you build a GUI app faster and
> easier.

Java would be a no go. For most purposes, it's fine, but iterating
through hundreds/thousands of records that can be required on a map make
it painfully slow at best. I wrote a prototype for a web based
map/database system using java with the JDBC driver at the time & I
ended up rewriting the map part in C and calling that from java. (I
also did a similar thing as a PHP extension - a C library called from
PHP scripts, which is how its running now.)

> > I use GRASS on my Linux system at home. GRASS is a (GPL'd) raster GIS
> > package. Open source vector GIS packages for Linux are, as far as I
> > know, nonexistent. Several commercial packages are available,
> > including ESRI's Arc/Info and ArcView (which I use at work). I'd like
> > to see an open source vector GIS package developed, perhaps based on
> > PostgreSQL's geometric data types.

Have you looked at what people are doing with Postgres & GRASS? I've
seen something on the GRASS web site about the project, but I don't know
how serious people were about working on it or what they expected to do
with it. If you haven't seen it around, poke around a little deeper -
it wasn't hidden that far.