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| There are many open-source software packages that deal with spatial data in some way and are also related to GRASS. This page provides a brief overview of history, current status, and platforms. It is based on a nice summary prepared by Michael Barton and will hopefully be edited by many people.
| | #REDIRECT [[GRASS and its siblings; a guide for the novice]] |
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| =GRASS=
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| GRASS is written primarily in C, with many additional modules created as
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| BASH scripts that chain together C modules. The GUI needs to be something
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| that works well with C, is cross-platform, and relatively easy to work with.
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| TclTk (used for the default GUI) fits these criteria very well. We are in
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| the process of switching the GUI to wxPython, which also fits these criteria
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| and is an even richer GUI development platform. There is a talented team of
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| folks working on the wxPython GUI, so development is going quite fast.
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| It originally ran only under linux but recent ports to Windows and the MacOS are nearing completion as of September 2007.
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| =QGIS=
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| QGIS is basically an easy to use viewer for geospatial data. A couple years
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| ago, Radim Blazek--a former GRASS developer--joined the QGIS project. He has
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| made a number of GRASS processes available to QGIS through its plugin
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| architecture to give QGIS some nice analytical capabilities. QGIS is written
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| in C++ I think, and its GUI is done in QT.
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| =JGRASS=
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| jgrass was started some years back, when GRASS had a pretty primitive GUI.
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| As best I can tell, it creates a GUI in JAVA and uses GRASS libraries to
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| carry out a limited suite of geospatial processing activities (mainly
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| hydrologic modeling). For a long time, jgrass was using the GRASS 5
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| libraries. I don't know if it has upgraded to GRASS 6 or not. As of a year
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| ago, jgrass merged into uDIG, and I don't know if it is still using GRASS
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| libraries as a geospatial analysis engine or not.
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