Feb

21

A day with FeatureServer #1

Filed Under GIS, PostGIS, devs, Windows, Ubuntu, Apache, FeatureServer, QGIS, uDig, gvSIG, Python, WFS, WMS | 6 Comments

Some friends already spoke me well about FeatureServer by MetaCarta in the last weeks, so I already was waiting for having a bit of time to get started with it. Then James posted this on his blog, and my curiosity was definitely fired.

So I decided to spend a day for installing and testing it, without thinking of the lack of documentation (FeatureServer is still a young project, so no wonder here if the only way to get infos is digging in the source code and posting to the mailing list). The day I considered to spend on it then spawned to more and more hours that I could imagine, and given my actually very busy schedule at my job, I had to find free hours during the night and the weekend. I then decided to write this post to help people in getting started with FeatureServer in a quicker way that was for me.

FeatureServer is a simple and powerfull RESTful-Pythonic WFS server.
Only from this last sentence there are 3 very important things that made me like (and you should - also) FeatureServer before even getting started with it:

  • Its RESTful architecture
  • It is written in Python, and having chosen Plone as our CMS here at my office I am starting to like this language very much
  • I truly believe that WFS is the way to go for remotely editing GIS data

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Jan

30

Installing PostGIS on Ubuntu

Filed Under GIS, PostGIS, devs, Ubuntu, QGIS, uDig, gvSIG | 9 Comments

With this post I will show how to install PostGIS 1.2.1 on Postgres 8.2.5 in Ubuntu 7.10 (but this procedure should work also for previous PostGIS/Postgres/Ubuntu versions) from repositories.
I will also show you how to load and secure GIS data and how to access them with some cool OS GIS Client (QGIS, UDig and gvSIG).
If you use this instructions together with my previous post, you will have a fully functional GIS Server Open Source Ubuntu workstation!

-1- Install Postgres

If you haven't Postgres, you need to install it (PostGIS runs on top of it). Open an Ubuntu terminal, and type:

sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client postgresql-contrib pgadmin3
sudo apt-get install postgresql pgadmin3

Postgres (8.2.5) will be now on your Ubuntu box.

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