Camptocamp Blog

Bolsena Code Sprint 2012

Stéphanie Debayle — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:17:25 +0000

For the fifth time, Bolsena will be hosting several members of the Geospatial community for a cross project codesprint. Typically members from several projects (Geonetwork, Geoserver, uDig, Postgis, etc..) gather to participate in a week-long codesprint. Usually one of the focusses is in cross project collaboration. This year the codesprint will take place during June 11-15.

Camptocamp will be attending this year with a focus on the Geonetwork and Geoserver projects.

A few of the topics that will be investigated are:

* Release Geonetwork 2.8

* Fix bugs with new UI

* Expanding the Geonetwork WebSpecs tests (https://github.com/camptocamp/webspecs)

* Refactoring Harvester code

* Refactoring Services

* Improving REST API

* Geoserver Monitoring options

It is shaping up to be a great time!

Scaladays 2012

Jesse Eichar — Fri, 04 May 2012 07:56:13 +0000

This year was the second year that Camptocamp attended the amazing Scaladays and this year I had the pleasure of presenting the Scala-IO library that I have been working on. For those not familiar, Scala is a ‘better’ Java that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). From the scala-lang.org website:

“Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.”

Over the last few years Scala has become one of the most popular alternatives to Java on the JVM and is seeing adoption in many fields from Finance to Genomics (and Twitter). Here at Camptocamp we have used Scala for a few projects to positive results. We currently have two open-source libraries resulting from this work:

* Scala-IO – An Input/Output library for Scala that is scheduled to be included into the core Scala library.

* http://jesseeichar.github.com/scala-io-doc/latest

* Webspecs – An integration test framework designed for testing Web applications with extensive extensions for Geonetwork testing. Geonetwork is in the process of adopting this library for its integration testing.

* https://github.com/camptocamp/webspecs

Scaladays is the annual Scala conference where Scala enthusiasts from around the world congregate to discuss all things Scala. It is one of the most dense populations of brilliant developers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. This year the Scala-IO project has reached a level of maturity where a presentation was in order.

The talk is available for viewing at: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/scalaio-intro

Due to time constraints caused by other talks going over time the talk was rushed in the beginning but the talk generated a great response and work is on going to get it incorporated into the core library.

OpenERP contributor award 2012 : Camptocamp lauréat !

Stéphanie Debayle — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:17:23 +0000

Camptocamp est fier d’avoir gagné l’award 2012 du meilleur contributeur mondial sur la solution Open Source OpenERP lors du OpenERP Customer, Community & Partners Summit 2012.

Ce prix est décerné à l’auteur des modules OpenERP qui sont le plus utilisés par la communauté : http://apps.openerp.com.

Contributeur depuis plus de 5 ans, Camptocamp a été très actif dans le développement de la solution. Les modules OpenERP WebKit report et GeoEngine sont deux probants exemples parmi nos nombreuses contributions.

DRBD – doublez vos octets !

Stéphanie Debayle — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:34:41 +0000

DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) est un logiciel libre sous licence GNU GPLv2 uniquement supporté sur GNU/Linux. Il permet la réplication de périphériques de stockage bloc à bloc, et peut être vu comme un disque RAID-1 réseau.

C’est un des composants permettant d’assurer la haute disponibilité des ressources installées sur les disques/partitions/volumes logiques qu’il gère. Dans cet article à multimains, il est expliqué ce que d’une part nous avons testé et d’autre part mis en place à l’EPFL pour différentes applications en production.

MapFish @ FOSS4G-CEE 2012, Prague, May 21-23

Stéphanie Debayle — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:31:09 +0000

FOSS4G-CEE 2012 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial in Central and East Europe) will take place on May 21-23 in Prague, Czech Republic.

FOSS4G-CEE & Geoinformatics 2012 is the first local conference focused on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial in Central and Eastern Europe.

This year, it is organized together with the traditional Geoinformatics FCE CTU conference in Prague, coordinated by the Department of Mapping and Cartography, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague.

Claude Philipona, Camptocamp director, will present “MapFish: state of the art” on May 23rd from 10AM to 12PM.

Fin du hackfest QGIS 2012 à Lyon

Yves Jacolin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:40:23 +0000

Le hackfest de QGIS à Lyon s’est terminé hier, lundi 16 avril, après 5 jours de travail. Camptocamp est fier d’avoir participé à cet évènement en le sponsorisant et en contribuant à divers projets importants.

De nombreuses présentations et réalisations ont été faites, notamment :

Victor Olaya : présentation de l’intégration de Sextant dans QGIS (Vidéo de la présentation : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-FzwJPPcDc) ;
Marco Hugentobler : refactoring du reéchantillonnage raster ;
Marco Bernasocchi : présentation de QGIS mobile ;
Tim Sutton : modification du système de release, proposition pour obtenir une version majeure tous les 6 mois avec 3 semaines de tests ;
Tim Sutton : mise en place des tests unitaires et fonctionnels par les développeurs suite à de nombreuses régressions et bugs bloquants (reprojection non fonctionnelle pour la 1.7.3 par exemple) ;
Paolo Cavallini : présentation des comptes du projet QGIS.

Parmi les projets réalisés lors de ce hackfest, nous retiendrons la réorganisation de la documentation afin d’en proposer une de meilleure qualité, sa diffusion sur différents médias (papier, numérique, mobile, etc.) et son intégration au sein de l’application. Ce travail de longue haleine a donc commencé lors du hackfest et se terminera dans plusieurs mois.

Ces différentes présentations proposent trois types d’évolution nécessaires aujourd’hui car QGIS a assurément atteind une qualité incontestable :

ajout de nouvelles fonctionnalités, notamment d’analyse ;
consolidation de l’existant en travaillant sur le refactoring du code (ie reécrire du code déjà existant pour le rendre plus consistant, plus solide ce qui permet généralement d’aller plus loin) ;
processus qualité : tests unitaires et fonctionnels, processus de release intégrant une phase de test.

Ce hackfest a assurément été un succès et nous vous invitons à tester la version en cours de développement via le projet OSGeo4W.

Mcollective and Augeas

Raphaël Pinson — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:30:54 +0000

Mcollective is a very useful tool, which often saves us a lot of time, especially when gathering information about nodes. One information one might want to retrieve from nodes is configuration parameters.

Look at this colorful configuration tree!

These can be easily retrieved using custom facts, but you probably don’t want to write and deploy new facts every time you need to query a specific configuration parameter.

This is where Augeas gets on the scene. Augeas is already used quite widely in Puppet to modify configuration files. It works pretty much like a configuration scalpel, allowing you to edit precisely the parameter you want, without impacting the rest of the file (and mostly, without having to parse the file syntax). But Augeas can also be used as a powerful, generic parser to retrieve configuration parameters using its XPath language. In our case, it only lacks a remote API. Coupling it with Mcollective would thus provide a great means of accessing specific configuration parameters remotely.

Fortunately, I was not the first to have this idea. Dean Wilson already wrote an Mcollective agent for Augeas, available on github. After a bit of improvement, and the addition of a client-side application, we now have a useful tool to query configuration parameters through Mcollective, in a similar way to that of augtool. The application currently provides two actions: match and count:

$ mco augeas match "/files/etc/mtab/*[file = '/']/vfstype" -F lsbdistcodename=precise

* [ ============================================================> ] 5 / 5

host-a7256c41c4 /files/etc/mtab/1/vfstype = ext4 host-b89d50982a /files/etc/mtab/1/vfstype = ext4 host-21cbf2a961 /files/etc/mtab/1/vfstype = ext4 host-265d6ed4a4 /files/etc/mtab/1/vfstype = ext4 host-12299c6389 /files/etc/mtab/1/vfstype = ext4

$ mco augeas count "/files/etc/passwd/rpinson" -F operatingsystem=Ubuntu

* [ ============================================================> ] 5 / 5

host-a7256c41c4 0 matches found host-21cbf2a961 1 matches found host-b89d50982a 0 matches found host-265d6ed4a4 1 matches found host-12299c6389 1 matches found

There are however some files that cannot be easily accessed via Augeas, since they are not in standard (or otherwise fixed) locations. You can associate them manually to Augeas lenses in the Mcollective command, using the --transform option:

$ mco augeas match --transform "Desktop=/usr/share/applications/*.desktop" "//Desktop\ Entry/Version" -W /host-21cbf2a961/

* [ ============================================================> ] 1 / 1

host-21cbf2a961 /files/usr/share/applications/gnome-sudoku.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/remmina.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/activity-log-manager-ccpanel.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/shotwell-viewer.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/empathy-accounts.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/deja-dup-preferences.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/inkscape.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/clusterssh.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/shotwell.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/junglediskworkgroup.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/htop.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/nact.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/indicator-datetime-preferences.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/deja-dup-ccpanel.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0 /files/usr/share/applications/empathy.desktop/Desktop Entry/Version = 1.0

More than one mapping can be added by separating mapping directives with commas.

The code for agent and application can be found on github.

OpenERP Roadshow 2012

Stéphanie Debayle — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:40:55 +0000

Les membres de la Swiss OpenERP Alliance (dont Camptocamp est membre fondateur et préside actuellement le comité de l’association) proposent des séminaires gratuits en Suisse Romande.

Ces séminaires sont destinés aux sociétés intéressées à comprendre OpenERP, une solution de gestion d’entreprise intégrée (ERP/ PGI), performante, évolutive et Open Source.

Différents lieux ont été agendés dans les cantons Genève, Vaud, Valais, Fribourg et Neuchâtel afin de vous présenter la nouvelle version OpenERP v6.1 et ses fonctionnalités en eGestion et eMarketing ainsi que ses connecteurs avec les sites d’e-shops.

Pour vous inscrire, c’est simple ! Il vous suffit de suivre le lien suivant :

http://openerproadshow2012.eventbrite.com/

Au plaisir de vous rencontrer au cours d’une de ces occasions !

FOSS4G North America 2012

Stéphanie Debayle — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:48:48 +0000

A team of Camptocamp’s Geospatial Business Solutions division will attend the FOSS4G North America conference which be held from April 10 to 12, 2012 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC, USA.

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conferences showcase powerful tools for building mapping systems and analyzing geospatial data.

In the heart of Washington DC, this year’s North American event brings together developers, users, and executives who are building, deploying, and evaluating open source for innovative applications across government and industry.

The program is available here. Camptocamp will present the following talks:

We are looking forward to meeting you at this occasion!

GeoExt Codesprint on 07-11 May, 2012 in Bonn (DE)

Stéphanie Debayle — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:13:30 +0000

The GeoExt 2.0 Codesprint has been scheduled for the week May 07th to 11th and will take place in Bonn, Germany.

Camptocamp, Mapgears, terrestris and OpenGeo will send developers to work on making GeoExt compatible with the library ExtJS 4.x.

We would like to ask all GeoExt users to support this codesprint. Become a sponsor and help GeoExt have a bunch of new worthwhile features in the future. All you need is call to us or send us an e-mail. Any amount is welcome! Thanks.