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Community Edition #81
Description
There is a need for a community edition of WorldWind. This will essentially be a community-managed fork that incorporates pull requests not belonging in the stable upstream version, but still being useful enough to the community that it should be maintained and kept up-to-date. See the discussion at pull-request #77 for some background on this.
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quonn77 commentedon Jan 12, 2017
I agree with you, there is a lot of work that risk to be abandoned. I have improvement for handling HTTP Redirection, drawing ground line for air track, increase detail rendering of 2D maps so it would be nice to have a common shared community fork where all those improvements could be available. If I can help, I am available.
wcmatthysen commentedon Jan 12, 2017
Good, I think we need a lot of people on-board to get the community-edition going. But, first we have to wait for the NASA guys to post the community contribution guidelines (this was mentioned in pull-request #77). The pull-request labels will be needed to determine what pull-requests are fit for the community-fork. In your case, you would probably have to then create pull-requests for the various additions in this repository. If it should go to the community-fork the NASA guys will then mark it with a label "community-edition" (or whatever label is decided) where it will then be picked up by the community-fork owners and merged into that repository.
quonn77 commentedon Jan 12, 2017
I believe, as already stated on the pull-request-77 that the community fork needs some members of the board from the NASA Team so we can better coordinate integration of derivative work into stable nwwj product.
pdavidc commentedon Jan 12, 2017
@wcmatthysen Thanks for opening a dedicated issue for this discussion.
The NASA team is certainly on board with a coordinated community fork. We're very busy at the moment working on sponsored feature deliverables for the Android and Web SDKs, but have this on our Kanban board to address as soon as we can.
wcmatthysen commentedon Feb 3, 2017
@pdavidc Any news? Would love to get started working on this.
pdavidc commentedon Feb 3, 2017
Thanks for your patience. We haven't forgotten about this need. It's on our backlog of tasks to address after we finish our current round of sponsor-requested features.
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 5, 2019
I think a community edition is now more relevant than ever (just my 2 cents).
quonn77 commentedon Apr 5, 2019
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 5, 2019
We do not need NASA's permission as far as I understand. It is open-source after all. We can just fork it and go our separate ways. It would be great to get their blessing though.
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 5, 2019
I see there is already an official community fork for WebWorldWind. Maybe we can reach out to @emxsys to host the community edition of WorldWindJava under the WorldWindEarth banner as well.
arihunta commentedon Apr 5, 2019
Sounds good--I somehow totally missed the announcement of the suspension of the WorldWind projects.
I'd be happy to lend a hand if there's anything needed to get this initiative off the ground.
caller commentedon Apr 5, 2019
perfect. we would be in as well. we have quite some potential contribution, (e.g. javaFX port) but since nasa was too refusive on merging anything, we gave up.
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 5, 2019
I think we should set up a rough road-map of what we want to accomplish. I would personally like to switch the project's build system over to Maven (or Gradle for that matter) instead of the clunky, archaic way that they have built the project using Ant. I have managed to do that in my own fork of the project, so it can be done with a bit of effort. I think the JavaFX additions would be great seeing as that is where everything is moving towards nowadays. We could probably go through the current pull request list and merge a lot of the useful ones into our own version. Bug-fixes should take priority. We can also focus some effort on modernising the project by introducing some Java 8 features as we go along.
I don't know how we can increase the visibility on this issue, seeing as it is quite old. It doesn't show up at the top of the issue-list on the project's GitHub page. We need to get the word out to as many other people that are interested as possible or this is not going to take off. I tried to get the fork going a year or two ago but no-one was really interested. You can see my post here on the forums as well (it never got any real traction).
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PJHogan commentedon Apr 6, 2019
Marco, I can only read the tea leaves, but my sense is that NASA got a wake-up call and so will continue to develop WorldWind, particularly the web version, especially given ESA has been coordinating with NASA on that development for a few years now. And the ESA contribution has been HUGE!
Unfortunately, the NASA 'official' numbered releases have been quite slow-on-the-draw (branches of the repository have many capabilities waiting for an 'official' release). FORTUNATELY https://worldwind.earth/ incorporates these, along with other 'select' contributions and bug fixes from the community.
And I believe the ESA Copernicus Sentinel apps are also pulling from there:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copernicus-sentinel/id1036738151
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=it.acsys.android.esaersapp
So, my reading is that the ESA+NASA joint effort will continue.
But if you want the best of that, now and to come, it's here,
https://github.com/WorldWindEarth/
caller commentedon Apr 7, 2019
Thx Patrick,
So we should still go full speed ahead on the java and android side with our community approach. 😊
PJHogan commentedon Apr 7, 2019
Virtual globe technology is essential to so much operational and infrastructure management, as well as Earth status, scientific and other. This open source platform has much to offer the world, not only in terms of support, but also facilitating both the opportunity for innovation and the sharing of solutions. WorldWind is the epitome of an essential software technology 'for the benefit of all.'
Thanks for your contribution of this wonderful gift to the world!
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 7, 2019
Just a heads-up to anyone that comes across this:
The community-fork of WorldWindJava has been created at: https://github.com/WorldWindEarth/WorldWindJava
thanks to Bruce (@emxsys).
Please feel free join in and contribute. We need all the help we can get to make this a success.
quonn77 commentedon Apr 8, 2019
wcmatthysen commentedon Apr 8, 2019
Yes, as far as I understand the develop branch is the latest unstable branch where development happens. You create a new branch that branches off from the develop branch when developing a new feature (ideally with a short name that describes the feature). Then, when the feature is ready the pull request is merged back into the develop branch. From time to time the develop branch gets merged into master when a stable release is made.
Beak-man commentedon Sep 3, 2019
Hello all,
Fortunately, WorldWind has received renewed commitment from NASA for continued development and support.
More information in the project's website:
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/news/2019-08-21-project-update/
wcmatthysen commentedon Sep 4, 2019
@Beak-man, are the WorldWind developers at least going to try and work with the open-source community this time? Because last time I checked, and if I can quote @pdavidc on this, the policy was:
That didn't really inspire a community to become involved in this project to be frank. But hey, that is just my 2-cents on this.
Also, you might have a look at what we did over at the community-edition. We managed to fix a lot of outstanding issues that were never addressed here. Will you actually merge in those changes, or are you going to re-commit the changes as your own like @zglueck did in this pull-request?
Beak-man commentedon Sep 4, 2019
@wcmatthysen , officially speaking, the point of contact to address such inquiries can be found here.
I'll tell you what I would personally like, though: Setting up the project in a similar way to this one (particularly the part about NASA's CLA) in order to improve our engagement with the open source community, which of course is part of our developer community. I'll bring it up with management and we'll see how it goes from there.
PJHogan commentedon Sep 7, 2019
Let's allow the FUTURE tohappen!
Get this planet onto one page for spatial data!
Come on NASA and community!
Please find a way to get it together 'for the benefit of all.'
wcmatthysen commentedon Sep 7, 2019
@Beak-man, @PJHogan, I'm going to be honest and say that I'm a bit pessimistic about this "renewed commitment" from NASA given the history of how the WorldWind devs managed this repository. I can already see a pull-request with work being done that has already being done by the community to some extent. The JOGL upgrade was done way back in 2016 by @xranby in pull-request #1. If you are sincere with regards to getting a community involved in this project you need to interact with them. You could start by merging some of the outstanding pull-requests that should have been pulled in a long time ago. Those stale pull-requests are just sitting there cluttering up the repository and it gives the impression that contributions are not accepted by the developers of this repository. But, from what I've seen how this repository was managed, it looks like you are going to run this again as an exclusive club where only the WorldWind devs interact with one another. Hopefully I'm wrong and you guys can rebuild a community. I just get the feeling that most of the community have already left and moved on.
PJHogan commentedon Sep 7, 2019
@wcmatthysen You are quite accurate in your concern!
And thanks dearly for your incredible support over the years. This repository certainly deserves the kind of respect you so accurately describe as lacking.
It will be interesting to see if NASA can finally rise to the occasion.
markpet49 commentedon Sep 8, 2019
@wcmatthysen Thanks for the feedback. A couple of points. 1. You should raise your concerns to the project management folks, they can be reached via the contact page on the web site. The people who respond to you here don't make the decisions about project direction. 2. We will be reviewing the old PRs as we work on the WWJ code. PR #1 is likely invalid as we're working with the new unreleased JOGL code (last modified on Sept 4 or so.) so as to be Java 11+ compatible.
markpet49 commentedon Sep 8, 2019
@wcmatthysen A third point. The NASA version of WorldWind has to be curated in a way that makes certain government agencies comfortable with using the software. That being said, I'm hearing positive noises from project management regarding community engagement. Unfortunately, only time will tell if your pessimism is justified or not.
DJViking commentedon Aug 13, 2020
NASA WorldWind just got new releases for Java and Web.
The news article on the shutdown seems to have been removed
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/news/...ension-notice/
Instead there is now an news article that says NASA has recommitted to WorldWind
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/news/...roject-update/
Does not look like the community fork is needed.