Aug

6

A day with TileCache: generating KML Super-Overlays

Filed on August 6th, 2008 at 12:55 pm under , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments 

My friend Diego Guidi is the smartest GIS/.NET developer I personally know here in Italy. He is the developer of NetTopologySuite, the port in the .NET world of the popular Java's JTS Topology Suite from VIVID Solutions. I wanted, sooner or later, write some stuff here about WMS and TMS, and now I am very happy that Diego asked me to publish this brilliant article about this topic.

First of all, let me thanks Paolo for hosting this post! I hope that this article can be interesting and useful like other stuff that you can find here…

Introduction

There are a lot of discussions out there about how to define Google Earth, Google Maps, and related apps… are they GIS? Viewers? Video games? Even a neologism was created: Neogeography. I think that all the folks out there have the same idea in mind: maybe Google don't make the same business as ESRI, but Google Earth is cool, and it's funny to play with it!

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Feb

21

A day with FeatureServer #1

Filed on February 21st, 2008 at 10:10 pm under , , , , , , , , , , , , | 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

10

Installing MapServer on Ubuntu

Filed on January 10th, 2008 at 11:51 am under , , , , | 10 Comments 

With this post I will show hot to install MapServer 4.10.3 in Ubuntu 7.10 (but this procedure should work also for previous Ubuntu versions) from repositories.

1) set Ubuntu sources needed for this software

Add universe ( http://archive.ubuntu.com/gutsy/universe ) and multiverse repositories to your sources (by default are not in Ubuntu)

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and uncomment this two lines:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse

save the sources.list file and then then update your sources:

sudo apt-get update

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Nov

15

Ruby on Rails applications with Mongrel cluster and Apache url rewriting on Windows

Filed on November 15th, 2007 at 7:49 pm under , , , | 25 Comments 

In the last post I showed you a configuration for serving Ruby on Rails applications with Mongrel cluster and Apache in a *nix environment (Ubuntu).
With this post I will reproduce the same configuration in a Windows environment.

The main difference in Windows is that you cannot use the mongrel_rails command with the cluster option (provided by the mongrel_cluster gem) that relies on daemonize functionality, only available on *nix platforms.
What you will need to do is to manually create n mongrel services for the n clusters you will need. Let's see how to do that.

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Nov

8

Ruby on Rails applications with Mongrel cluster and Apache url rewriting on Ubuntu

Filed on November 8th, 2007 at 6:03 pm under , , , | 4 Comments 

This is the workflow I followed for setting up my Ubuntu (Ubuntu 7.04 - the Feisty Fawn, but should work without problems also for the latest Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon ) development machine for serving Rails application with Mongrel clusters and Apache.

Install Ruby, Gems and Ruby on Rails

# install ruby
sudo apt-get install ruby ri rdoc libmysql-ruby
# download rubygems
sudo wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
# tar rubygems
tar -xvzf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
# ruby setup.rb rubygems script
cd rubygems-0.9.4
sudo ruby setup.rb
# download and install Ruby on Rails framework
sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

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