The successful FOSSGIS 2014 was an important milestone in the further development of SHOGun towards an OpenSource project. SHOGun as part of the “GDA Wasser” project was presented by Johannes Weskamm:

Afterwards, a BoF (Birds of a Feather-Session) on the topic of SHOGun took place. Both events generally generated positive reactions among the participants.

SHOGun is a complete WebGIS solution that covers numerous tasks in the WebGIS area through the use of established frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, Hibernate Spatial, Ext JS, OpenLayers, GeoExt) and offers a high degree of flexibility.

A current example for the use of SHOGun is the project “GDA Wasser”, a modern and comprehensive GIS architecture for the water management of Rhineland-Palatinate.

SHOGun takes over core functions in the backend such as the creation, administration and editing of GIS interfaces. This also includes user and rights management through Spring-Security. The frontend consists of dynamically generated GIS applications based on the JS libraries Ext JS, OpenLayers and GeoExt2. The GIS clients are characterized by a high degree of functions that are normally known from desktop applications.

At this point, we would like to report on the activities related to a living OpenSource project. The main results and findings of the BoF can be summarized as follows.

• In order to establish SHOGun as an OpenSource project, other companies and developers should be more involved in the development process.
• A prerequisite for this is an improvement of the OpenSource standing. SHOGun should move more into the focus of the OpenSource GIS community. For this purpose, a comprehensive refactoring as well as the implementation of demo frontends should be implemented.
• In addition, the usability for projects should be optimized. In order for as many actors as possible to benefit from SHOGun, the requirements must be redefined and the essential functionalities improved. In addition to some technical changes, this also includes the review of each function in order to distinguish between project solution and general solution.
• In addition, the license with which SHOGun is published should be reviewed. A separation between SHOGun Middleware and the SHGOGun clients is also being discussed, which could then be dual licensed.

In order to take the positive wind of the FOSSGIS with us, the decisive next steps were defined in a further meeting.

In order to increase the attractiveness of co-development on SHOGun, an easy-to-install code base will be made available on github in the near future. The focus here is on a fast publication with a low entry barrier and optimized documentation (including the system requirements).

• Currently, the establishment of a PSC (Project Steering Committees) is being pushed forward on the mailing list.
• In order to establish SHOGun as software, a separate logo for the project should also be created.
• Overall, the possibilities of the middleware will be more tangible in the future through various demo applications. The goal is to attract interested parties, users and contributors.
• In addition to attracting contributors, the focus is on the attractiveness for the end user or the use in concrete projects. For this purpose, the backend SHOGun and the frontend SHOGun-Client (working title) should be separated from each other in terms of licensing. This will create a flexible solution that is not purely bound to the GPL.

In summary, it can be said that the FOSSGIS has breathed new life into the SHOGun project and our activities will hopefully lead to a growing community. Therefore, we welcome anyone who is interested in the implementation of a project with SHOGun or in participating in the SHOGun project.

If you want to get a first impression…

Code: https://github.com/terrestris/shogun (currently outdated!)

Video (Presentation FOSSGIS2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jlVHDfCCIk