Jun

6

Spatial Database for Postgres and ArcGis users: how to choose

Filed on June 6th, 2008 at 5:45 pm under , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments 

As many of you can have already read, ArcSde for Postgres is coming out at ArcGis 9.3 (it is currently in the release candidate state). It will let you store geometries in two formats, Esri geometry and PostGis geometry, in the same fashion ArcSde for Oracle is letting Esri or Oracle geometries be stored.
I have seen some interest in the GIS community about this new, and i was reading interesting posts by Bill Dollins, Paul Ramsey, James Fee and Dave Bouwman, so I thought i would post here my opinion. Plus, as some of you may already know, zigGis 2.0 is out, so I am very interested in understanding where it would be better to use one (ArcSde) or the other (zigGis 2.0) solution.

First let me introduce you my point of view: i am since the ARC/INFO era a great fan of Esri software, and I am one of the many users in the GIS community saying that Esri is much much better vs Open Source in the GIS desktop products sector.
In fact, while also in the GIS OS scenario there are good products like QGIS, uDig, gvSIG (and some other), in my opinion no one of them still can even fairly reach what ArcGis Desktop and its extensions can actually do (with the big limit that you can use it only in a Microsoft box, but that is another story).
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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

30

Installing PostGIS on Ubuntu

Filed on January 30th, 2008 at 5:29 pm under , , , , , , | 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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