EOxServer 0.4

This major release introduced a lot of new features since the last stable version and included a major restructuring of many of EOxServer internals.

New Data Models

The 0.4 release overhauled the previous data models to provide a more efficient, flexible and performant way to query and insert data.

More important is that the introduction of the new data models made the Data Integration Layer obsolete. Only Django’s QuerySet are necessary for all data model related tasks. Especially for large datasets this mechanism improves the overall performance drastically.

The new backends data models provide a more flexible approach for additional data sources and packages that can be realised using the New Plugin System.

New Plugin System

The new plugin system was introduced to make the extension of functionality easier, more efficient and less error prone. For this reason trac’s plugin system was copied and added to the EOxServer source tree.

The configuration of the plugins are not done in the settings.py file instead of the database.

Miscallaneus Internal Improvements

Various internal APIs have been revised and improved.

Decoders

A new API for decoding config files, XML files and KVP requests has been established. It has a large spectrum of functionality and allows to parse requests to actual Python types with proper validity checking.

Backends

A new backend data retrieval and cache system was implemented. This goes inline with the new data models and plugin system to easily extend the existing storage possibilities.

XML Encoding

A new XML encoding mechanism on top of lxml was implemented which is an order of magnitude faster than the previous dom based solution.

Management Commands

All management commands have been revisited and streamlined to their respective core functionality.

For convenience there now is a bulk ingestion command to allow a fast way to register a large number of datasets with a prepared CSV file.

Service Improvements

Also on the outward side of EOxServers capabilities a lot has been achieved. The service layer makes extensive use of the new Plugin system which makes it easy to add new services, renderers, connectors and whatever else is required.

WCS 2.0

EOxServer now fully supports the following WCS 2.0 service extensions:

WMS (all versions)

The WMS rendering was rewritten from scratch to allow various additional layer types, input data and storage forms.

WMS mask layers allow the visualization of various mask types (clouds, snow, low quality or the like) either in a colorized manner or as a cutout of the original raster.

WPS 1.0

EOxServer now supports synchronus processes invocation via the WPS 1.0 protocol. Processes are components that are easily written and plugged into any EOxServer instance.

Webclient

The existing webclient was replaced by a custom build of EOxClient. It allows the inspection of more than one collection or dataset and features a dynamic timeline to ease the visual inspection of large datasets.