Just recently stumbled upon MapNik and would like to use it in our
upcoming project as it appears to fit the exact technologies we're looking
for. We are a python/django/postgis/C++ shop so it was great to see all
these things seemingly brought together for us. There's so much stuff that
MapNik connects to, however, that I'm not sure how much of the capabilities
of the underlying libraries are well supported or easily accessed. Would
appreciate if anyone could give me any pointers in MapNik "best practices"
or, even better, sample code out there that is doing something very similar
to our fairly common use case.
The proof-of-concept is a simple zoomable map with a vector street map
layer + superimposed raster imagery layer (orthorectified to fit the prior
layer correctly) + another superimposed grid of some specified length/width
rectangles which will all be managed in a PostGIS DB and viewed from a web
browser. The follow up would be to tile the imagery (if this isn't done
automatically) and support multiple zoom levels of imagery ala Google Maps.
Our challenge, beyond getting the base functionality working, is to also
make it highly responsive to the map viewing user.
So my questions are:
1. What aspects of the above are already well supported by MapNik?
2. What aspects of the above maybe aren't "built-in" to MapNik directly but
would be fairly easily implemented on top of it and that you feel MapNik is
an appropriate platform to build upon?
3. What aspect of the above does MapNik currently have no support for and
should be done using other tools?
4. Is there any open source examples of doing major aspects of the above
that we should build upon for our initial proof of concept?
5. Regarding user responsiveness, has anyone tried various techniques of
pre-loading tiles behind the scenes in AJAX, storing tile URIs in a manner
where memcache or an independent media server can serve them
up interdependently of the app server, etc..? Be curious to hear any
recommendations for techniques or experience as to what is typically the
bottleneck.
I would expect what we're doing has been done by many before us so would
like to avoid reinventing the wheel and get a chance to spend some of this
effort making the wheel better. :-) We will certainly be willing to share
the results of anything we come up with that may be useful.
Thanks for any pointers/advice/interest!
-- Ben Scherrey
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