ArcSDE ST_GEOMETRY and Geoserver

I've been working on a migration plan to upgrade the HGL database. It's about 1.5 TB and we're moving from SDE 9.1/ Oracle 10G to SDE 9.3.1/ Oracle 11G. It took some testing to figure it all out but it's working now. However, part of the migration means upgrading the spatial geometry type which brings up a question about Geoserver and SDE. Are we all using the same data type? And, what's the compatibility matrix looking like between Geoserver and SDE in terms of correctly handling data stored as ST_GEOMETRY in SDE?

Mercurial & HgEclipse

Steve pointed me to Hg Init, a tutorial on how Mercurial works. I've also found the tutorial resources at the Mercurial website useful as a reference.

The documentation for HgEclipse, a Mercurial Eclipse plug-in, however, has been less satisfactory. There is slightly more documentation at the MercurialEclipse website (HgEclipse is a branch of MercurialEclipse, so it is quite similar), but still doesn't get into the nuts and bolts. For example, what does Synchronize do, exactly? I gather that it does a Pull and a Push, and that the Team Synchronize perspective shows incoming and outgoing changes, with diffs. Still, without a concrete definition, I'm more comfortable using each command separately.

GeoTools

I've been looking at GeoTools, which is the Java API used to build GeoServer. This may be a useful library for writing server-side scripts for OpenGeoPortal, and seems to be a useful library for interacting directly with an ArcSDE Geodatabase. Additionally, there appear to be a number of objects to deal directly with XML metadata.

Mailing List

I've been reading Karl Fogel's book on open source projects. His repeated emphasis on openness has convinced me to start a mailing list. I gave some thought to making a couple lists so there would be one for developers, one for announcements, etc. but decided against it. Instead, I made only one. If and when that starts to break down the community can revisit the issue.

The mailing list is OpenGeoPortal@googlegroups.com. Let us know if you would like to join the list.

Repository and Development Environment

Steve and Chris are using Eclipse and HgEclipse. They have populated the Google code repository. Currently it consists of an empty Eclipse "Dynamic Web Project" with a single JSP added (adminHome.jsp). Details on creating and populating a development environment have been documented in the project wiki.

There may be little time spent on the project until next week. Then, we will begin development on the items previously listed.

Meeting notes

Steve and Chris met today. Our goal review was to review Patrick's functional specification and to set some near-term goals we can get started on. We generated a document from both our morning meeting and our afternoon meeting.

Karl Fogel's Book

Karl's book is titled "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project". It has been very well reviewed at Amazon and is available for free on-line.

Hello

This is the first post for the new OpenGeoServer blog. Our goal is to create, as a community, a reliable, powerful, flexible GIS data portal that meets the needs of academic organizations.