Carbontools - Intro to Open Geospatial Development

gletham writes "This is the first in a series of interesting articles designed to provide the reader with an overview of CarbonTools, the new toolkit for open geospatial application development based on OGC standards. The combination of OGC standards and modern software development systems open up the potential for a whole new class of innovative geospatial solutions. CarbonTools brings these worlds together for the first time."

I thought that...

[djsmiley]

Im not being funny here, i always thought that OGC was the hax bot that existed for counter-strike (ewww). As i ran a lan gaming center and thats what they would always be claiming was being used.

As im from the same(ish) background as most other slashdot users, i went walkies on google and found:

"Welcome to OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Through our member-driven consensus programs, OGC works with government, private industry, and academia to create open and extensible software application programming interfaces for geographic information systems (GIS) and other mainstream technologies. Adopted specifications are available for the public's use at no cost. Learn More."
http://www.opengeospatial.org/ [opengeospatial.org]

So anyone that thought that CS had finally made its way onto slashdot, think again! (and praise the lord!).

P.S. Not going to post AC as im not taking the mick, just hope i dont get modded down for it =/

HUH? What exactly is interesting/new here?

[notyou2]

This is simply another commercial product in a very large sea of other free and non-free [google.com] competing products.

Did the submitter or editor even notice that this "open software" product isn't even available for purchase yet, let alone download?

Fluff, pure and simple.

obligatory wikipedia links

[j1m+5n0w]

OGC [wikipedia.org], GIS [wikipedia.org]

-jim

O-O experts shouldn't write XML

[chiph]

I had a look at the specs, and they're a good example of why object-oriented programmers shouldn't write XML specs: They tend to turn everything into a complexType when there's no need.

Example: They defined a type called ArrayAssociativeType, and then used it to further define array and bag types. All they should have done is define a parent element that is named "plural" (like: <regions></regions>), that would naturally indicate that its contents can ocurr multiple times.

Simplicity is a vi