Thinking in GIS

There is a recurring question at GIS mailing lists, forum and at some extent in my mailbox: what is the best way to master Python for developing geospatial applications?I myself had this question far away in 2006 when I started switching from proprietarysoftware to Open Source, and had identified in Python the way to go.In this post I will try to quickly summarize what is the best way to go in my opinion.If you are completely new to Python, first things to check out, are some very basic and popular resources, like these ones:the official Python tutorialthe "Dive into Python...
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In many situations, in your web applications, you will need a feature for geocoding an address, a city, a country...A possible approach is to use the Javascript API of the main geocoding services (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, GeoNames...).But as I have showed in a previous post, if you are using Python, there is an excellent API that will take care of this, without Javascript headaches: GeoPy.In this post I will show how to use geoPy, OpenLayers and a bit of JQuery to assemble a simple but nice tool for geocoding within OpenLayers.In my server code I will use Django but...
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There are now may geocoding web services out there, like Google geocoder, Yahoo geocoder, geocoder.us (only for US address), Microsoft MapPoint, GeoNames and MediaWiki.Normally you may access this web services API directly with HTTP REST request, and get a response in common formats like , JSON, KML.For example you may geocode with the Google geocoder an address like this one: "1071 5th Avenue, New York, NY" with a request like this one:http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1071+5th+Avenue,+New+York,+NY&output=json&oe=utf8&sensor=true_or_false=&key=your_apy_keyIn this case we are querying the Google geocoder web service to get a response in json via the output parameter in the query string. This is the...
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