Database Output Storage for PyWPS

Introduction
My name is Jan Pisl and I study at the Czech Technical University in Prague. I will be participating in this year's GSoC. My project’s aim is to develop database storage support for PyWPS that would allow output data to be stored in a database in a way that is compliant with the OGC WPS Standard. I will be using Python 3.6.

Project
Title: Database Output Storage for PyWPS

Student: Jan Pišl

Mentors: Jáchym Čepický, Martin Landa.

Project's repositories: GitHub repository, Project's page on GSoC website

PyWPS
PyWPS is a server side implementation of the OGC Web Processing Service (OGC WPS) standards 1.0.0. It is written in the Python programming language, it runs on Python 2.7, 3.3 or higher and it is tested and developed on Linux. It uses a ConfigParser format for configuration files. It supports a variety of geospatial software and tools such as GRASS GIS, R Project or the GDAL library. Synchronous and asynchronuous invocations are supported. As for request encoding, two options are available - key-value pairs (using HTTP-GET) or XML payload (using HTTPPOST). Every process that is to be deployed on the server is defined as a class and has several mandatory parameters. The key parameter called "handler" gets invoked every time there is an incoming request, it accepts the request and returns a response.

In 2016, it upgraded from PyWPS 3 to PyWPS 4. Some of the more significant changes include every input being considered a list of inputs and all inputs having file, data and stream attributes. These attributes allow better manipulation with data.

Python
Python is a high-level programming language that fully supports object-oriented and structured programming. Developed in the late 1980s, the first version 0.9.0 was released in 1991. In 2008, Python 3.0 was released. Currently, the most up-to-date version available is 3.6. It was designed as a syntactically simple language, using whitespace intendantion instead of brackets and English words rather than punctuation. It is a dynamicallytyped language, which means it is not neccessary to specify a data-type when defining a variable. For its simplicity and readability, Python is often considered a good first programming language to learn. One of the key advantages of Python is its high extensibility. It provides large standard libraries and also an extensive number of other modules, packages and libraries, so most of the common programming tasks are already solved, scripted and made available.