Sunday, August 22, 2010

WorldWind - WMS Authentication Support

A new user on the World Wind forums has submitted some changes for review and inclusion into the World Wind source. It is nice to see some contributions from the community still. I picked up his changes and belatedly did a code review and tried to test them. Note this authentication just adds a username and password via the .NET Framework's "System.Net.NetworkCredential" object added to the existing request sent to the WMS server.

Unfortunately I don't have a WMS server with authentication to test his fix against. I did some basic regression testing and existing WMS functionality seems to work fine. From reviewing the code nothing appeared to be harmful and it made sense, though he added no commenting for any of the changes. I asked the user to provide more code comments as well as to finish an enhancement he was apparently making to the WMS browser for username and password fields in the browser GUI.

Forum discussion

You can get the source and see it in action from my SVN branch:

https://nasa-exp.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nasa-exp/branches/ammianus

I will hold off on commiting his changes to the World Wind trunk until he responds to my questions and maybe finishes his work on the WMS Browser.

I have to say, this is probably my last contribution to the WW.NET project for now. I think it has run its course and led to a dead end, technically and in terms of a learning experience. I have begun new projects to learn more about coding in GNU/Linux and as a result want to focus my efforts towards Real-Time and Embedded system development. I have to thank the World Wind project both as a learning exercise and for the fact it did get me a job interview for a GIS programming position, and it was the first true Open Source project I made contributions to. Here's to many more.

No comments:

Post a Comment