During the latest QGIS developer meeting (aka HackFest), I’ve had the pleasure to meet Victor Olaya, the developer of Sextante. He kindly presented Sextante to all participants, which you can see here :
Since a few months, he is rewriting Sextante (initially in Java for gvSIG) as a new QGIS Python plugin. Sextante provides access to a huge number of processing modules, and acts as a geoprocessing environment that can be used to call native and third-party algorithms from QGIS.
With the help of Victor, the meeting has been quite productive and we now have a first working version of the OTB Sextante algorithm provider. This completes the list of already available algorithms : GRASS, Saga, GDAL, mmqgis, fTools…
And I was not the only one interested in using Sextante. An OGR algorithm provider is on the way, and the developer of the WPS client plugin has also expressed interest in porting it to Sextante too. You can expect the list of available back-ends to grow regularly in the near future.
Regarding the functionnalities, Sextante shows up as a toolbar in the QGIS desktop GUI, and allows to process QGIS raster and vector layers by clicking on a processing module entry. It automatically handles the potential I/O conversions needed for some backend (like GRASS and SAGA), and loads the results as new QGIS layers. It tracks down your history of launched modules, logs, etc… It can also be called from Python in a headless environment (ok… who said “QGIS WPS server” ?).
The killer feature is the Modeler, providing a simple yet effective way of creating pipeline of Sextante modules to build up new higher level Sextante modules. This makes it very easy to interface Orfeo Toolbox with all the other geoprocessing environments available in Sextante.
Here are a few screenshots to give you an overview of Sextante :
Many thanks to Victor for providing Sextante in QGIS !
Seeing so much interest in Sextante from the QGIS community, and provided Victor will be working on the plugin full time until next year, we can hope for a beautiful future for the Sextante QGIS plugin !
Julien
Hi,
> and provided Victor will be working on the plugin full time until next year
What do you mean exactly by this?
In short, does it mean that Victor Olaya is going to work “FULL-TIME” on Sextante – Qgis for sure (OR it is not certain at all; and thus he might work on Sextante – Qgis only in his spare time)?
Best regards and THANKS A LOT for the update 🙂
Yes, full time, that’s what he said to us !
Better ask him directly if you want more info…
Also, I did not mention that there is a GSoC proposal this year related to Sextante improvements. More funding, more features ! Let’s hope it will be selected !
Sivio,
That’s right, my plans are to work as much as I can on this, since I have seen a lot of interest from the QGIs community, much more than what I expected. I planned to take sometime off SEXTANTE (which in fact I am doing, since I am not working in the Java version), and started this just in my spare time. But I has turned into something that I believe has a lot of future, so I will be working on it kinda full-time. It’s really a different proyect to me :
Regards
nada mas .. que darte las gracias Victor …
Will OTB support in Sextante be made available soon? 🙂
Mathieu,
The current version of Sextante already provides OTB support.
Julien Malik,
This is great that OTB work inside QGIS from Sextante. Please give some instruction on how to load OTB into Sextante toolbox. Out of the box Sextante do not have OTB tools
Thanks
VA
Will the library be available for calls from python in an arcpy-fashion?
I don’t know if it is in an arcpy-fashion but there is a Python interface which allows to access to OTB applications. You can find an example in the OTB Cookbook:
http://www.orfeo-toolbox.org/CookBook/CookBooksu7.html#x16-170001.3.4
Hope it helps.
Manuel