FDO Report 2007

FDO (Feature Data Objects)

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
• Contact name: Greg Boone

Key Accomplishments

The following 4 releases of FDO were made available in 2007:

• FDO Open Source 3.2.1 Released - March 2007
  • Bug fixes from 3.2.0 release
  • The complete roadmap and features of FDO 3.2.2 can be found here: http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/milestone/3.2.1.

• FDO Open Source 3.2.2 Released - July 2007
  • Improved reverse engineering of views in MySQL and ODBC
  • Upgraded filter support for Upper, Lower, Floor and Ceil functions in SDF
  • Enhanced Bounds support for GDAL Provider configuration files
  • FDO Provider Support for ArcSDE 9.2
  • Addition of the FDO KingOracle Provider
  • The complete roadmap and features of FDO 3.2.2 can be found here: http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/milestone/3.2.2.

• FDO Open Source 3.2.3 Released - August 2007
  • Bug fixes from 3.2.2 release
  • The complete roadmap and features of FDO 3.2.3 can be found here: http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/milestone/3.2.3.

• FDO Open Source 3.3.0 Beta 1 Released - December 2007
  • Addition of the FDO Expression Engine
  • Addition of the PostGIS Provider
  • Continued development and release of the KingOracle Provider
  • Alpha Release of the SQL Server Spatial Provider
  • The complete roadmap and features of FDO 3.3.0 can be found here: http://trac.osgeo.org/fdo/milestone/3.3.0.

FDO adoption into Third Party applications continued in 2007:

• 1Spatial Radius Studio v1.4: 3.2.0
• Safe Software FME® 2007: 3.2.1
• Autodesk Map 3D 2008: 3.2.1
• Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise 2008: 3.2.2
• MapGuide Open Source 1.2.0: 3.2.3
• A list of products using FDO can be found here

External Vendor Adoption of FDO:

• FME® FDO Provider for AutoCAD® Map 3D 2008

Areas for Improvement

• Implement a formalized release process.
• While community contribution to the project is growing, most of those contributions are still on the periphery of the project. The core development on the API is still primarily fueled by developers at Autodesk. The project needs developers from the community actively working on some of the core components.
• Getting started with FDO and the process of building new providers are still more difficult than they need to be. Enhanced documentation, tutorials and certification tools would go a long way to improving this experience.
• A public build system for FDO would provide the community information on the state of trunk and access to daily builds of trunk.
• Linux based builds of FDO remain more difficult than they should be. Additional work is required to the build system of FDO to make it fully FGS viable.
• The PostGIS, King Oracle and SQL Server Spatial providers would really benefit from increased community development and support.

Opportunities to Help

All contributions and help is welcome, but in particular:

• Develop a new FDO provider for your currently unsupported format
• Help work on the PostGIS, KingOracle and SQL Server Spatial Providers
• Refine the website navigation and site structure.
• Develop and refine help and documentation, in particular a getting started tutorial.
• Enhance the Linux build system and complete the FGS package work.
• Testing and quality bug reports.

Outlook for 2008

2007 was a gret year for the FDO project. Considerable momentum has grown around the development community. The community hopes to keep this momentum going in 2008. Community contribution continues to grow at a steady pace, and we believe the 3.3.0 release will spark even more enthusiasm and collaboration. Finally with a little effort and support we believe the number of external developers contributing to the core code base will start to increase.

Expected Major 2008 Milestones:

• Graduate OSGeo Incubation: Febuary 2008
• Final Release of FDO 3.3.0: March 2008
• Final Release of SQL Server Spatial Provider for 3.3.0 and 3.2.3
• Continued enhacements to the feature set of the PostGIS Provider
• Continued development towards a service pack release of FDO 3.3.1 and beyond
• Continued development of new Data Providers for FDO
• Enahcements to the FDO API as discussed on the FDO Futures Discussion Page