On the second weekend in January, the FOSSGIS e.V. invited people to a hacking event at the Linux Hotel in Essen for the second time. A total of 27 people responded to this call, who work on open source software, organize free conferences, or wanted to improve the OpenStreetMap project.
All participants were — as in 2013 — very enthusiastic about the environment and the yield of this weekend, even if Dirk Frigne from GeoMajas would certainly have wished the weekend would have gone differently: His car was totaled by a tree that was snapped by gusts of wind early Saturday morning. Fortunately, no one was injured and Toyotas can be replaced.
After the shock of the storm damage had been digested, the weekend was highly productive on all levels. The projects briefkastenkarte.de, deegree, GeoExt, GeoMajas, Imposm, MapProxy, OpenJUMP, OpenRailwayMap, OSM Buch, SHOGun and weeklyosm as well as the FOSSGIS e.V. were able to discuss, debate and convert many things into tangible results. An overview of the results of the individual projects is provided by the summary entry by Astrid Emde.
We from terrestris were on site with a total of four developers, who mainly took care of the GeoExt and SHOGun components that we frequently use.
Together with Christian Mayer, Kai Volland and Marc Jansen were able to take decisive steps towards the next versions of GeoExt. The next minor release GeoExt 2.0.3 was planned and prepared, and the future version GeoExt 2.1 is now slowly coming within reach. GeoExt 2.1 is intended to provide the functionality of GeoExt 2.0.x based on the latest version of Ext JS 5.1.0, but at the same time still work with ExtJS 4.2.1 in order to simplify the changeover. With some changes to the code base made after the hacking event, we are now at the point that none of the 2246 unit tests fail in the Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers. A pre-release is expected shortly (probably in parallel with the version 2.0.3 announced above). For the concrete changes, please refer to the pull request on Github.
Nils Bühner and Daniel Koch mainly worked on a redesign of SHOGun, a free software based on the Java frameworks Spring and Hibernate as well as GeoExt and OpenLayers. The basic libraries of the software were updated and the project was architecturally divided into two separate projects. Client and server components can be maintained and further developed more easily due to this decoupling, and can also be replaced if necessary. The work done here has not yet been published on GitHub (or similar), but this will be done shortly. Major releases (initially in pre-versions) are also in the offing in this project due to this far-reaching change.
We will of course go into more detail about the projects here as soon as these releases have been released.
In addition to the results, which are expressed in commits and changesets, we would like to emphasize that the hacking event once again offered the opportunity to think outside the box and exchange ideas with people from other communities. Especially in the fast-moving IT world, where development is done by people who are geographically separated, this is an important aspect of such events that we do not want to miss.
Participants of the Hacking Events (© M. Reichert)In summary, we would like to thank FOSSGIS e.V. for organizing, financing and carrying out this thoroughly successful weekend. We will also be happy to participate in future events of this kind.
