GRASS Development with Eclipse / CDTIn the Distant Early Warning System (DEWS) Project

Peter Löwe

GeoForschungsZentrum-Potsdam, DRZ, Telegrafenberg, D1473 Potsdam, Germany, Contact: ploewe@gfz-potsdam.de

The tsunami disaster affecting the Indian Ocean region on Christmas 2004 demonstrated the short-comings in tsunami detection, public warning processes as well as intergovern-mental warning message exchange in the Indian Ocean region. The Distant Early Warning System (DEWS) Project - aims at strengthening the early warning capacities by building interoperable tsunami early warning systems.

Of special importance is the distant communication of warning information among warning centres. The project complements the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System-Project (GITEWS).

Project-Partner INCO-Partner (Authority) INCO-Partner (University)

- DEWS Partner Distribution Southern

Geological and Nuclear Sciences, New Zealand

Geological Survey & Mines Bureau, Sri Lanka

Thai Meteorological Dept., Seismological Bureau, Thailand

National Disaster Warning Center, International Affairs, Thailand

Badan meteorologi & Geofisika Meteorological and Geophysical

Agency BANA , Indonesia

Ministry of Disaster Management & Human Rights, DisasterManagement Centre , Sri Lanka

Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Thailand

Bandung Institute of Technology,Indonesia

Moratuwa University, Dept. of Engineering, Sri Lanka

Prince of Songkla University,Thailand

Chiang Mai University, Thailand

Northern

Atos Origin SA ., SpainCoordinator

GFZ Potsdam , Germany

Saab AB ( publ ), Sweden

DATAMAT S.p.A. , Italy

Helsinki University of Technology Communications Laboratory,

Finland

Citizen Alert Services BV,Netherlands

National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster

Prevention, Japan

Swedish Rescue Services Agency, Sweden

University of Bologna, Italy

Engineering IngegneriaInformatica S.p.A. , Italy

DEWS provides a Reference Model for interoperable tsunami early warning systems and applies the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Based on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) all resources (e.g. sensors) can be decoupled from proprietary access: •A Service Layer provides uniform access to resources •An Orchestration Layer to access workflows and processes for the early warning phase.The ESB concept is used in both the upstream and downstream part of DEWS.

Motivation

GRASS GIS is a valuable tool for complex data manipulation. It is often applied in the backend of a project to generate spatial data resources to be used with other software tools. The DEWS project requires siginifacnt amounts of spatial data resources. To establish reasonable production capacities, it is vital to have specifiv GRASS versions easily available on various platforms, preferably on different operating systems.

Approach

GRASS developers can use integrated development environment (IDE) for efficent code development and software deployment. For this, the example of Eclipse in conjunction with the C-Development Tool (CDT) is used. It can be used to show how to access, manage and compile the GRASS sourcecode independently from the platform via the IDE.

Larger Picture

For developers the short-term benefits of this approach are extended options for collaborative development, code refactoring and the wrapping of the traditional building-chain in ant-Code.

The Potential

In the last years, IDEs have increasingly become the standard approach to code development. Most programmers have become used to them and take them for granted. To lower the curb to join the active GRASS developer community and to extend and rejuvenate the community in the long term, IDE-based platform-independent GRASS-development will play a prominent role in the future. This will help to future-safe GRASS GIS as a community-driven FOSS GIS project.

Example of the GRASS source tree as represneetd in the Eclipse IDE. The frame in the middle shhows the ant-Code fragemnt which is used to execute the gRASS build process. The front shows the GRASS splash screen of the software as it was called up right from the IDE.