I think this is a great project, and would definitely find a very useful place in the open-source community. An additional benefit to you is that other devs can contribute functionality/support that you will then be able to use in your consulting projects.
However, supporting the community itself is an effort. Talk to Chris Schmidt & Schuyler Earle on the effort they put into OpenLayers. Just 'open-sourcing' something doesn't guarantee a community or benefit :) But I'd also like to point to a project that could probably see great integration with HyperGIS. ModestMaps is a flash map library built by the devs from Stamen Design: http://modestmaps.com/ http://modestmaps.com/example.html I don't believe it has vector support yet. And I'm not a flash developer, so I don't know how easy/hard the integration would be. But if your generated MovieFiles could be integrated into the ModestMaps library/layers, i think that would make for a great toolset. Especially, as you pointed out, the increasing interest in RIA's. What do you think would be the possibility of also supporting FlashLite for mobile (vector layers of directions on my phone) Andrew On 5/9/07, Peter Strømberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear fellow geowankers Please forgive/ignore this post if you think it entirely off topic. Our company make a (currently) proprietary solution for building online map/GIS applications and we've had quite a bit of success with it, enough atleast to pay the rent, buy nappies and go on holiday once a year. Recently, inspired by others, even members of this very forum, we had the somewhat strange idea of realeasing the software that's taken us 4 years to develop as Open Source. We know we can still live off developing actual web solutions based on it, so why not let others have a go with it aswell? The client/server, hyperGIS (www.hypergis.com) converts just about any data in vector or raster format to .swf (Flash). This means you can build quite slick client-side user interfaces and so called Rich Internet Applications or RIA's (Adobes marketing dept, not ours :O) "quickly and easlily" as they say. The raw data is used to pre-render objects as flash MovieClips, together with all their attributes (if you need them) and creates a well indexed database over them for quick retrievel. The client can also except data in XML, though this is noramlly only used for "live" data such as GPS tracking, etc. because of the sheer size compared to binary swf. The server that converts the data to is written in C#, and uses MS-SQL for storage, but could easily use other databases. The XML layers can and already do run on just about platform that can spit out a text file. And the point is? Well it would require some time and effort to release and maintain this as open source and would be a complete waist of our time if it was completely surplus to the requirements of the community. So to the point, would anybody be actually interested in using it, if it were available for download, for free? We would really appreciate the views of the geowankers who are exactly the people we'd be hoping would adopt the technology to build all kinds of great stuff. You don't need to respond here unless you think it is relevent to geowanking, but anything from flames to beta tester applications you can send to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and I promise all comments will be helpful for us to make this decision. Thanks for listening, and if I am off topic please tell where I should post this. Cheers Pete S. _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
-- Andrew Turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] 42.2774N x 83.7611W http://highearthorbit.com Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
