I was educated in GIS using ArcGIS (Desktop and Workstation) and researched with it with (very) short peeks at MapInfo and uDig . During that time, I was satisfied with the program as I used relatively small databases and didn't do a lot of repeat tasks and ArcGIS has a lot of cool tools to analyze scientific data.
For two years now, since graduation, I been working in a company which is in a whole different scale. I deal with huge databases, doing relatively "simpler" tasks, but moreover they are composed of repetitive tasks (I do a series of simple tasks once a week to the whole database). During this time, I've used AutoCAD (as a lot of our data is drawn using AutoCAD) a lot and grew to appreciate it a lot – The greatest advantage is that using the LISP Programming language and using system variables you can control a whole lot of the settings – whether it concerns customizing the default value for a tool, eliminating the use of dialog boxes in the program, or options to script the automatic opening and manipulation of drawings.
Are there any GIS platforms out there, free or not, that have this high level of customizing, or am I doomed to frustrated manual work?
I prefer platforms with a good UI along the scripting options, but that's not a must.
Answer
I am not experienced enough to give a give an answer from very many aspects, but... I did my first things in GIS in ArcView 3.x writing in Avenue. I really liked the speed and possibilities. Then I have never understood the joy in waiting for ArcGIS to start, searching for the right tool and then find the tool I need, needs ArcInfo.
My new love is PostGIS. It is very much more than a database for storing. The built in functionality makes it possible to do all processing and analyzing I have had use for so far. In most cases it is very much faster than Arc products.
In open source world you will not get one solution for everything but there is projects and software covering all your needs.
As I said I do the processing and analysing in PostGIS. I can store the sql-queries in text files to reuse (like any tool in other software but much more transparent). You can write functions in a lot of different languages like plpgsql (a special PostgreSQL language) Python, pLR, C and many more.
For desktop GIS I use mostly QGIS. What is not in the core of QGIS is in the extensions. If that is not enough you can write your own extension in Python and I think also C++)
If you are used to uDig that is of course an alternative.
If you want to do some web mapping you could try MapServer. Mapserver won the big benchmark on this years FOSS4G conference in serving WMS. Esri didn't want to participate this year. Last year they had registered to participate but never did. This year they didn't even register.
GeoServer is another alternative for serving web maps. It is very user friendly and serves a lot of different formats. It also handles WFS-T so you can edit map data and send the edits back to the server.
If you want a lightweight and very fast WFS-T server you should take a look at Tiny-OWS
Well, the list could be long of competent software together building a very powerful and of course customizeable suite.
I mean can it be more customizable. You have access to all the source code. And for the money you save not paying annual fees to Esri you can take some free and study programming or hire a programmer. You will get a lot of coding in those projects for the cost of an ArcGIS Server license.
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