Friday, March 22, 2013

SEXTANTE news and inofficial preview

Dear All,
As some of you may already be aware, there have been substantial changes to the SEXTANTE project.
The website at www.sextantegis.com now focuses on a new implementation of SEXTANTE, written in Python and designed primarily to run from within QGIS.
In response to this, we have contacted Victor Olaya, the original creator of SEXTANTE, and he agreed for us to transfer the Java source code to the gvSIG CE SVN. From now on, we will keep developing SEXTANTE as an official part of the gvSIG CE project.

Over the past few weeks, I have made extensive changes to the SEXTANTE settings system and the graphical Modeler. You can download a snapshot of the current SEXTANTE version here
Copy the ZIP into "../extensiones/es.unex.sextante" and unpack it, overwriting any existing files. You might also want to delete your old settings in the "Sextante" folder in your home directory.

The most important improvements are:
1. Renovated settings pages.
2. Better portability: GRASS, SAGA and R are by default looked for in subfolders of the SEXTANTE installation folder.
3. Brought back the ability to set up a GRASS installation anywhere on your system as an algorithm provider.
4. Vastly improved graphical modeler. This tool is now stable and should be fit for productive work.
5. GRASS vector modules work on 64 bit Windows.

For now, you will also need to select "High compatibility mode" on the GRASS settings page. This will make sure that SEXTANTE runs with any version of GRASS 6.4.x.
I would especially like your feedback on the new graphical modeler (note that the documentation is currently out of date). If you find any problems, please report them via the bug tracker (don't forget to select "SEXTANTE" as current project first).

Best,
Benjamin Ducke
gvSIG CE Team

2 comments:

  1. Hi Ben,
    I've just tried the latest trunk version of SEXTANTE. Your work on modeler is simply awesome, congrats! My favourite new functionality is the export model as Java code. I'm sure that it will contribute to expand the SEXTANTE built-in algorithms in the next future.
    On the other side, IMHO GRASS and SAGA GIS integrations have to be refined just a little bit in order to make them fully working. I'll submit some tickets in bug tracker asap.
    Thanks for your amazing work on SEXTANTE.

    Cheers,
    Antonio

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  2. Thanks, Antonio. We will put a lot more work into SEXTANTE before the release of gvSIG CE 1.0. If you want to help then one thing that would be really useful would be bug reports on individual modules that do not work well with the current SEXTANTE. Note that SAGA GIS support is currently being reworked. I am implementing some new hooks in SAGA 2.1 that will allow us to have more seamless integration.

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