Chapter 5. Using PostGIS on the desktop
This chapter covers
- OpenJUMP
- QGIS
- uDig
- gvSIG
In this chapter, we’ll cover some popular open source GIS desktop viewing tools often paired with PostGIS. You’ll find that each has its own strengths and weaknesses and caters to a certain niche of users or tasks.
We’ll start off by providing a brief at-a-glance summary of these tools, liberally ladling out our personal opinions. We hope that once you’ve read this chapter, you’ll have a better understanding of which tools are best for what you’re doing and for your particular style of working. We’ll focus mostly on the use of these tools to view and query data, but we’ll also highlight the features each offers for building custom desktop applications, and the availability of plug-ins and scripting to extend built-in features.
We’ll start with a quick summary of the various tools’ features. After reading this section, you may be able to rule out some of the tools altogether for your purposes, and you can skip the sections that pertain to them. If you’ve already invested in one of the tools, we recommend that you go through this section to at least see what you might have missed. New features are being added to these tools more quickly than any book can keep up with. If you’ve dismissed a tool due to the lack of some critical feature a year ago, you may find it now incorporated.