GGL2-gvSIG course is finished

We have just finished the first GGL2 Geoprocessing course together with the gvSIG Association and it is time to sum up all the experiences and the share all the improvements we made in that context.

First, the interaction with the students has been very pleasant. They were quite different, coming from different professional areas, so it was not easy to give a course that would fit everyone. There were some students that did not have any previous programming experience and needed to learn the basics of programming as well as the GGL2 specifics, so they had to work very hard. There were also some students that did have previous programming experience and did a lot of optional exercises, so they worked very hard too. As a result, almost all the students got their gvSIG certification. Only a couple of them could not pass the course due to unforeseen circumstances.

On the other hand, the evaluation of the course by the students has been also satisfactory. According to the satisfaction survey, they found it very interesting and seems like the exposition of the contents has been very clear. However, the duration of the course has not been exactly adequate to the contents.

As far as the language and tools are concerned, there have been a lot of improvements and corrections before and during the course. Before the course, and specifically for that matter, we prepared a new set of command line tools. These command-line utilities provide two commands in order to compile (gglc) and execute (ggl) GGL2 code. Thus, it is now possible to use a lightweight tool in order to compile and execute GGL2 and it won’t be necessary any graphical user interface anymore. However, the graphical user interface still is pretty cool and we recommend you to use it as well. Moreover, new documentation has been added to the GearScape site. There’s a tutorial on how to compile and execute programs with the command-line tools [1] as well as some reference documentation [2].

Furthermore, the students worked on different environments and they found some bugs related to the different platforms. They also tried a lot of different things in order to solve the exercises and they found also a few hidden bugs. All these issues are resolved now. As a result, we have published a new milestone GGLM5.

Finally, regarding documentation, the course has been published[3] using a Attribution-ShareAlike CC license. Also, the solution to all the exercises are available in the GGL2 repository[4]. Thus, it is possible to download the course documentation and correct your exercises against the provided solutions. If any question pops up, simply address it to the mailing lists [5].

We want to thank the students for their interest and enthusiasm and the gvSIG association for their help in making the course a reality.