Hey Saul,
Thanks for that....and you guys did an excellent job with the MassGIS
Geospatial Web Services wiki. It's a great resource!
http://lyceum.massgis.state.ma.us/wiki/doku.phpHappy Turkey/Tofurkey Day.
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email]
[mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Christopher Schmidt
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 7:06 AM
To:
[hidden email]
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Boston] Switching From ArcIMS to "something else"
On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 04:54:14PM -0500, Saul Farber wrote:
> Actually, MassGIS has done a pretty good job of using FOSS in a
'hybrid'
> way and the use of geoserver with ArcSDE is fairly well supported.
Right, sorry: I wasn't being specific enough. *I* don't know how to use
ArcSDE with FOSS well :) But you do! that's why community is good ;)
MapServer can read vector and raster data from ArcSDE... but the
CGI-style nature of MapServer means you need to use atypical modes of
operation, which results in a more difficult user experience. GeoServer,
on the other hand, is not a CGI-style setup, so it works better for
this.
-- Chris
> My take on how to 'web-enable' an ArcSDE based storage would be
> something like this:
>
> 1) Install GeoServer
> 2) Install the GeoServer ArcSDE support
> 3) Pick which layers you want to serve and create 'featuretypes' for
> them in GeoServer
> 4) Create styles for each featuretype (perhaps using udig's SLD
> editor)
> 5) Apply the styles to the featuretypes
> 6) Go use the built-in openlayers 'demo client' to see your data.
> 7) (optional) hit 'save source...' on your demo client page and start
> hacking!
>
>
> --saul
>
>
> On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 10:01 -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > So, I got 3 personal (count 'em, 3) emails yesterday on what to
> > switch away from an ArcIMS server solution to. Since I hate
> > answering anything in private (shared knowledge > non-shared
> > knowledge), I thought I'd address them here, since I know that a
> > fair number of the local people work in/around MIT, which uses (as I
> > understand it) ArcIMS to do their WMS-style work.
> >
> > The first question to answer when switching away from an ESRI-based
> > solution is what type of data you're serving from. Moving away from
> > ESRI can be hard if you've got all your data in a giant ArcSDE
> > database -- not impossible, but it makes things more difficult. If,
> > on the other hand, you have things like shapefiles, then it may make
> > the switch easier.
> >
> > Next, figure out what you want to do with the data: Do you want to
> > serve it up to GIS clients (ArcGIS, etc.)? Do you want to create a
> > web interface? Do you want to help people to create mashups? Do you
> > want to let users edit it? etc.
> >
> > If I were to take something like MIT's 'whereis' map datasource, I
> > would probably (personally) do something like:
> > * Dump the data to a PostGIS interface
> > * Load it up into MapServer (this requires converting the existing
> > style information into MapServer's mapfiles, which is possibly
> > time-consuming)
> > * Set up a WMS against that, using MapServer
> > * This will be used by clients who consume WMS, a la ArcGIS/qgis
> > * Set up TileCache in front of it, picking a small number of
> > projections that are acceptable to pre-cache. I'd probably just
build
> > this on a machine with lots of disk: it seems unlikely that you'd
get
> > more than 100GB of cache even with three different layers. These
> > TileCache layers are 'basemaps' -- you probably want EPSG:4326
(for
> > most 'unprojected' maps), EPSG:900913/SphericalMercator (for use
with
> > Google Maps), and the local projection (for local-only maps).
> > * Use OpenLayers to load the relevant layers into a map
> > * Use either a small overlay WMS layer or OpenLayers vector support
to
> > display selected features and the like.
> > * Stand up FeatureServer, with attribute querying on useful
attributes,
> > to get WFS-like services for GeoJSON, GeoRSS-Atom, KML, etc. This
can
> > also have read-write layers for user input.
> >
> > Then, you document all these things and see who comes along and uses
> > them :)
> >
> > Specific use cases, of course, matter. If your primary goal is to
> > make data available for use in ArcGIS, this might not work for you.
> > But MapServer (5.0) + TileCache + OpenLayers makes a great, fast map
> > browser: see
http://boston.freemap.in/ for an example of my personal
> > attempts at that.
> >
> > Regards,
>
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Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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