Toucan Navigate 3 - a sneak preview?

While we've been adding some new features to the next version of Toucan Navigate, the GIS world hasn't been standing still. The explosion of interest in GIS, engendered by WorldWind and Google Earth hasn't gone unnoticed, neither here nor at Microsoft.

While Toucan Navigate 2007 will maintain its high-speed two dimensional view of the world for most things, we're thinking of incorporating Microsofts new 'SpaceLand' 3D mapping engine for those that need it.

Here's a screenshot. It also gives you an idea where we're going with Toucan Navigate 2007. We've got some other surprises planned, so stay tuned!

Introducing Bambuco

We've been involved in a few larger Groove implementations now and one common theme has been how important it is to be able to integrate Groove with other systems. Sometimes this is just a one-off import from a database, but mostly it is making Groove Spaces work as a part of a larger, ongoing business process. For example:

• Importing customer and contract information from a corporate database into a forms tool that a field sales teams uses to guide their customers through a contract renewal process,
  
• Building new spaces when a natural disaster strikes
  
• Copying data out of Groove for searching and indexing.

After writing a few very job-specific tools for jobs like the above, we decided to take it one step further and build a tool that takes our understanding of the Groove platform and make it available to anyone who needs it, Bambuco combines our understanding of Groove, Microsofts .NET runtime and the Boo scripting language to create a simple, consistent and well documented approach to integrating Groove with other systems.

Here's an example of a Bambuco script.

class FilesToolDemo (GrooveScript):

def Main():

try:

space = Groove.GetSpace("Bambuco Samples")

filesTool = space.GetFilesTool("Files")

ListFolderContents (filesTool.Root, 0)

except e:

print "problem: ${e.Message}"

def ListFolderContents (folder, depth as int):

depth++;

// \t is the tab character. When you multiply a string by a number you end up

// with the string duplicated that many times. We use this to increase the

// depth of the printed tree of folders and files.

tabs = "\t" * depth

print "${tabs}[${folder.Name}]"

for file in folder.Files:

print "${tabs}${file.Name}"

for subFolder in folder.Folders:

ListFolderContents(subFolder, depth)

This script lists all the files in a given files tool.While the programming langage specifics might not be familiar to you, we've had a positive reception from people used to working with Excel or Access macros.

1. The first two lines define the script name and the main procedure for the script.
   
2. After that we get a Groove Space and get a files tool from it.
   
3. Then we jump to another procedure called ListFolderContents which follows the Main procedure
   
4. ListFolderContents prints out a message and then lists all the files in the folder.
   
5. After that it lists all the contents of the folders within this folder.

Easy :-)

Clearly this example isn't very userful - you're very unlikely to have a space called "Bambuco Samples" after all, but there's a great deal more power available and preliminary documentation in the Bambuco Developer Center. Let us know if you want a demo!