Tuesday 6 March 2012

Battle of the Spatial Scripting Languages!

The gloves are down in this exchange on gis.stackexchange, over LOC counts for Fiona, JEQL, and GeoScript-JS.


Fiona takes one on the chin in the first round!  But Sean recovers quickly, and makes a hit by pointing out that Fiona allows defining new functions right in the scripting language.  This would be feasible in JEQL as well, by providing hooks to into JVM-based scripting languages.  And it's also very easy to develop extensions as simple Java functions or classes.

Now, this is really just a schoolyard scuffle over a very simple use case for spatial scripting.  What the fans really want to see is a face-off over a more complex task...

5 comments:

bitner said...

Martin -- that was actually the first time I had used JEQL. Knowing it wrapped all the PostGIS-ish goodness I had a hunch it would be trivial and was certainly correct.

bitner said...

Oh, and if this was simply an LOC fight, ogr2ogr can still take the cake at 1 (even if an uglier solution).

Dr JTS said...

Cool.... be interested to hear more about your usage of JEQL

And good point about ogr2ogr - maybe post that to the gis.stackexchange thread?

sgillies said...

How about 2 processing tasks, chained, for the next step in complexity? Something like my code in http://sgillies.net/blog/1126/more-learning-from-haskell.

Dr JTS said...

Yes, that seems like the next step in complexity. I'll work something up for this specific task.

To stretch out a bit further, I have also worked up a task which involves joins and aggregation. I'll post on that as soon as it's done.