Len,
I really appreciate the time and work you have spent so far. Hopefully
your application will be successful. Please let me know if there is
anything else that I can do for you. I'm thrilled to hear that you are
applying to work on Mapbender.
I hope you don't mind that I cc this mail to the mapbender developer
list. Maybe someone has an insightful comment on your ideas.
Find my answers to your questions inline:
Len Kne schrieb:
Christoph
While working on the Web 2.0 styling sounds like a lot of fun, I am leaning
towards proposing to work on the administrative modules; work on these
modules would provide immediate help to our project as well. I think back a
year to when I first saw Mapbender's admin interface and how tough it was to
figure out. But as you said, once it is mastered, it works quite well.
I wonder if Mapbender users can be divided into two groups. The first group
are the power users who create interfaces and want full control of all of
the modules. The other group of users want to have a couple set
applications to choose from, but make some minor modifications, such as
styling (colors) and maybe add or remove a module. They may be using
Mapbender as a service setup by a power user. I think the GeoMOOSE project
is trying to address the needs of this second group, although their
administration module consists of using a text editor, which can be tough
for the casual user.
Thus a two tiered administration module could be helpful. I guess that
approach is already somewhat in place with the different administration
modules. My though is a tabbed approach where some of the basic settings
are immediately accessible and the user would have to drill down further for
more involved changes. You had mention an application that would use a drag
and drop approach to placing modules. Having a frame with an example of
what the GUI would look like while making configuration changes would be
great. This would be very helpful, but I have no idea how hard that would
be to implement. It seems like it could real affect the core of Mapbender.
I guess it would not be too hard. You would only have to deal with the
data model. For the client side, you could use jQuery-Plugins for Drag
and Drop. But this is just an idea and not required, however, it would
be an eye-catcher!
I guess changes to the admin modules are likely going to have some affect on
other modules. For example, if there was an easy method to globally change
a color scheme, different modules apply color style differently (element
variables vs. style attributes in the div like navFrame). Would it be
necessary to make some of these modules consistent?
I guess you could pretty much create a single CSS file and use it for
all admin modules. What would be nice was, if some refactoring could be
done to the admin module scripts. Most are still "scripts", which means
that there is hardly any reusable code (classes). For example, there is
no PHP class for the entity "user". Having more reusable code would make
Mapbender more stable and easier to improve. Again, I would not require
you to do it.
The logic of user management in Mapbender works well, some help with the
interface would be helpful for the second group of casual users. One change
that would be helpful for our project would be to allow groups to be members
of other groups.
This sounds promising. I would love to see that happen.
I guess that's the ideas I have now. I'm guessing the Mapbender developers
have many ideas about what the administration modules should look like. It
would be good to get all the ideas from developers and maybe the Mapbender
user forum about what they would like to see. Then design a plan and make
it happen. I'll sum all this up and get a proposal on to the GSoC website.
Thanks
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: Christoph Baudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 5:54 AM
To: Len Kne
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code
Hello Len,
thank you very much for contacting us. We are thrilled to hear you are
interested in joining Mapbender in this year's Summer of Code.
Len Kne schrieb:
Christoph
My name is Len Kne and I am interested in working with the Mapbender
project this summer. I am working on a Master of Geographic
Information Science at the University of Minnesota and have been a
Mapbender user since March 2007; working on a project called Minnesota
Interactive Internet Mapping (MIIM). MIIM is a web-based application
that introduces K-12 and post-secondary students to principles of
geography and GIS. More information about MIIM is at
http://maps.umn.edu and about me at
http://mgis.umn.edu/people/facExpStudents.php?UID=knex0001.
I am not an experienced programmer, although I have been able to make
small modifications when needed. I've made several small changes to
Mapbender to fit our needs, for example to include the overview window
in the map frame and changes to save digitized features directly to
Postgres. This term I am in an internet programming class which is
giving me the needed foundation to understand JavaScript, AJAX and XML
(GML now makes some sense too).
Looking at the Mapbender GSoC ideas, several of them match work that I
am interested in. Working on the administration modules is of great
interest to our project. A feature we are wanting to add to MIIM is
the ability for a teacher to open a web form and easily customize the
gui/module/application. One of the primary reasons we selected
Mapbender was its use of Postgres to store the configuration, thus
making updates fairly straight forward. I even started to setup a
simple GUI for end user management that works okay. I envision an
administrative module that is hierarchical, allowing end users (in our
case teachers) to have some simple functions and administrators to
have additional tabs with more functionality.
This sounds interesting, can you please elaborate? Do you mean create an
application, for example by adding buttons and moving them around via mouse
dragging? Or adding a map frame and position and resize it? This would
definitely be nice. The current way (edit gui elements) is a little
complicated, but actually very flexible if you mastered to understand the
horribly crude UI ;-)
Can you please also elaborate on the user management component? What exactly
is which user allowed to do and what not? We would need to integrate this in
the Mapbender logic, and hopefully make it a core Mapbender module.
Anyway, working on the administrative side is highly welcome and badly
needed.
I am also quite interested in the implementation of Web 2.0 graphics
into Mapbender (I like the fisheye menu on the MB home page). People
using MIIM have expressed a desire for a more modern look. This could
also help with the limited screen real estate by not needing to
leaving space for query results or use of pop-up windows. I will be
working with the jQuery framework and AJAX in the internet programming
class I am currently taking.
Yes, Mapbender doesn't look very much up to date. We would like to change
that as well, any ideas are welcome. Did you see our experiments with
balloon style pop-ups (which are actually div-tags) at
http://www.mapbender.org/Mapbender_Development_Sprint_March2008 ?.
However, I guess this is not top priority for us, but of course important.
Please let us know if you have additional ideas.
I've seen talk on the listserv about using OpenLayers within
Mapbender. Not sure I have a grasp on what this would look like, but
some of the navigation functions within OpenLayers are quite nice.
This would basically be an OL client, but it's configuration would have been
done by Mapbender. I'm not experienced in OL, but I assume you configure it
either by writing JavaScript code or sending a configuration via XML.
Mapbender could write that XML in respect to the data in its database. For
example, instead of a module "mapframe1"
Mapbender could have an "OpenLayers" module for displaying its WMS. But you
can imagine, that this would require to really dig deep into the Mapbender
core.
Finally, we have been wanting to add more GIS tools to MIIM. This
ranges from simple buffer and overlay (or any of the other spatial
functions in PostGIS), to the ability to set/change classes in a
choropleth map. I've been looking at how SLD could be used to set
class colors/styles in a choropleth map, but have not gotten past the
idea stage with this topic.
Mapbender 2.5 will feature some SLD stuff, although I have to admit I'm not
sure about the status. I think it will contain some kind of SLD editor for
WMS.
Additional GIS functions sound very interesting as well. Please elaborate on
this topic.
My question after this lengthy background is if there is specific
information the mentors of Mapbender would like to see in an GSoC
application? Is it best to split these ideas into several proposals
or as one idea?
I think we should not address too many different things here. I would rather
suggest that we pick one or maybe two ideas and really build a solid,
detailled module.
Please contact me again, and please elaborate a little on your ideas, they
sound promising. I will share these ideas with the Mapbender PSC and we will
agree on a topic asap. In fact, you may even contact the Mapbender
development list directly, register here
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapbender_dev
Thanks for your consideration
I'm very excited about your ideas and I would be very happy if we could work
something out. If you want to talk directly, please join us at IRC at
freenode (channel is #mapbender).
Thank you very much for your time
Christoph
Len Kne
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