Where in the world can you find a free geographic information system (GIS) application? Why, on SourceForge.net, of course. Geomajas is a web GIS application framework for people who want to build enterprise GIS solutions. It can be used as-is or integrated into another application.
Unlike many GIS applications, Geomajas has a strong client-server architecture. Its back end integrates the data sources and handles calculations, to offload work from the client. On the front end, faces, which are currently either based on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) or Dojo, allow display and editing of the data in the browser, without a need for browser plugins.
The project’s lead development team, all from around Gent, Belgium, consists of Joachim Van der Auwera, Pieter Degraef (who also acts as community manager), Jan De Moerloose, and Dirk Frigne.
Frigne started the project for a company that was doing several GIS projects. Van der Auwera says, “They saw the potential of growing the internally used GIS code into a separate product. They spun it out and published it as open source software at the beginning of 2009. Since then we’ve done a lot of cleanup and made improvements, including the migration to use Spring and the newly added GWT face, and the new 1.6 release is the result of that work. We think we now have a strong base for evolving the framework in the future.
“We released Geomajas as open source because we are motivated open source users and we like open development and thought sharing. We like to think this matches well with our engineering mindset, and having cooperation and input from the community helps us to build a better framework. We chose to host the project on SourceForge because we believe it is the most important open source forge, which hopefully helps us to grow the community.”
The framework depends on other projects, including GeoTools, Java Transaction Service (JTS), the Spring framework, and Hibernate. Van der Auwera says, “For development we use Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, and we are avid users of JIRA for issue tracking and planning and Hudson for our continuous integration. We try to apply agile methodology and planning, though we are uncertain how this will work when contributors are not able to meet face-to-face.”
The project aims to publish a new release every month. In upcoming versions, Van der Auwera says, “We have plans to formalize our plugin system to make it easier to use by auto registering with dependency checks. We will leverage this to build several plugins to support additional faces, more types of layers, and additional features like caching, rasterization of vector layers, and integration of business rules.
“As with all open source projects, we could use help. We welcome input from people using Geomajas, suggestions for sample applications, additional plugins, and improving the faces, and of course input to improve the documentation. We would also welcome all information about projects in which Geomajas was used. We see quite a few downloads happening, but have no clue what people are doing once the download completes. Users can reach us either on the forum or the developers mailing list.”