Hey Dane, > So by interface to you mean a graphical admin panel/ web-based configuration page?Are you working on making the WMS parameters configurable or the styling/rendering of a given layer configurable, or both?
Yep - we're making a web-based interface to the WMS parameters. There's a bit of a summary at http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2008/oct/24/putting-anti-poverty-activists-map. However, as far as actual data goes, it's been unfortunately another stack - we have very large CSV files which contain coordinates and bounding boxes of tons of geographic features. Luckily, these match up with our shapefiles, but it's no guarantee, and dealing with details (like boundaries changing over time) will only be more of a headache. That's the big problem we're dealing with - Drupal needs to know where things are in order to tell Mapnik where to put it's bbox, and it would be nice for Drupal to ask the source information of the map (PostGIS) rather than an arbitrary schema and funny MySQL dumps. > Yes I've used FeatureServer and it is awesome. FeatureServer with a PostGIS datasource is a fantastic way to interact with you geodata in a restful way, allowing you to query and update data in postgis and therefore modify dynamically the layers that mapnik is rendering. As far as formal WFS services GeoServer is also a great tool. That's awesome. Are you using the GML output of FeatureServer? I've been having some problems implementing a parser and some doubts about the viability of GML in general vs. KML - KML seems to be gaining traction, while GML is waiting on a new version and is lacking a schema to make it valid (I asked on their mailing list: http://featureserver.org/pipermail/featureserver/2008-October/000298.html and haven't gotten any bites.) > However, I'm not sure exactly what problem you are trying to solve. Clearly having the drupal server hosted on different machine than the mapnik WMS will present some challenges in integration :) The main reasoning behind having separate servers is that we'd like to have a simple Drupal stack which we can hand off to clients and they'll be able to deal with it, and have either hosted or distributed mapping instances which we can continue to refine. It hasn't been that much of a pain so far - it's actually kind of nice to be able to clone (via SliceHost) Mapnik instances whenever memory or customization requires it. It's great to know that someone else is doing this kind of stuff! And I somewhat envy you, I do my side-project dreams in Django, and it's a wonderful world :) Tom On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 2:18 AM, Dane Springmeyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > Hey Tom, > Awesome stuff. Sounds like we are working on similar things (except I'm > fully entrenched in the django world). > > I'll comment more inline... > > On Oct 24, 2008, at 7:16 AM, Tom MacWright wrote: > > Hey guys & girls, > > So I'm working on making a good interface to Mapnik (via WMS) from Drupal. > > > So by interface to you mean a graphical admin panel/ web-based > configuration page? > > Are you working on making the WMS parameters configurable or the > styling/rendering of a given layer configurable, or both? > > It has become sort of a priority to have Drupal be aware of the actual data > involved on the server - so that the coordinates of surface features, etc., > are located in the mapping stack (Mapnik, PostGIS) instead of Drupal's > database and schemas. > > > Hmm, I don't quite follow this... Maybe you could say more about how you > currently have drupal talking to mapnik? > > > So I'm considering setting up FeatureServer and a WFS interface to query > those details, and I'm interested to see what other people have done in this > area. Since WFS isn't provided by Mapnik, is there a standalone server that > is commonly used by the community for this purpose? WFS seems like a great > solution to the problem here (sidenote: not directly querying PostGIS since > the mapping server != the drupal server in many cases). > > > Yes I've used FeatureServer and it is awesome. FeatureServer with a PostGIS > datasource is a fantastic way to interact with you geodata in a restful way, > allowing you to query and update data in postgis and therefore modify > dynamically the layers that mapnik is rendering. As far as formal WFS > services GeoServer is also a great tool. > > However, I'm not sure exactly what problem you are trying to solve. Clearly > having the drupal server hosted on different machine than the mapnik WMS > will present some challenges in integration :) > > I'd love to hear more about how these tools are currently working for you > and what you specifically hope to gain in having them as a more integrated > stack. > > Dane > > > > > > > Thanks for any experiences or insight! I'm really interested in getting a > good stack built and contributing back when I make some progress. > > Thanks! _______________________________________________ > Mapnik-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users > > >
_______________________________________________ Mapnik-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users
