Survey of Desktop Mapping Software - Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools - page 267

There are just a few cons:

• Still evolving (especially with regard to ossimPlanet)
• Has a bit of a learning curve
• Advanced raster processing functions not well documented

OpenEV

OpenEv is written in C
and makes extensive
use of Python.

OpenEv allows you to view vector, raster, and WMS data sources. Open-
Ev has been around for a while (since 2000), and recently development
on it seems to have slowed. The latest version (1.8) was released in
2004, and the project is currently in maintenance mode. 9 There is an
effort underway to produce version 2 of OpenEv, using the Gtk2 toolkit
to give it a more modern look and feel. Currently, version 2 is still
under wraps and can't be tested. If you are interested in OpenEV 1.x, it
is distributed as part of the excellent FWtools suite. 10

Note that OpenEv

is available only for Linux and Windows.

Should you consider using OpenEv? Frankly, there are probably better
choices for you to use in visualizing your data. While there is nothing
wrong with OpenEv, the facts that it's in maintenance mode and that
version 2 hasn't surfaced yet makes it less attractive.

Quantum GIS

Quantum GIS is written
in C++ and uses the Qt
class library.

I'll try to maintain some objectivity is this section. 11 The Quantum GIS
project was founded in early 2002 with the original goal of building a
GIS data viewer for Linux that was fast and supported a wide range
of data stores, in particular the PostGIS spatial database. Since then,
QGIS, as it's known, has grown to support a large array of data types
and runs on many platforms, including Mac OS X, Windows, BSD, and
of course Linux. The project has a strong developer community, and a
glimpse at the user map (see Figure 11.4 , on page 185 ) shows that it is
being used widely around the world.

In Figure A.6 , on the following page, you can see a simple example of
QGIS with the countries of the world layer displayed on the map canvas.

QGIS provides viewing for both vector and raster data sets. Support for
the majority of these is provided through the GDAL/OGR libraries (see
Section 11.2 , Using GDAL and OGR, on page 186 ) .

9. See http://openev.sourceforge.net for details
10. See http://fwtools.maptools.org .
11. I founded the Quantum GIS project.