Technical Ramblings

Got a late start, so I missed the PostGIS case studies session I wanted to get to see. However, I’m currently at the QGIS as WMS Server talk. It is an interesting idea — essentially, they created a C++ CGI which calls out against the QGIS libraries.

It doesn’t really solve what I would like to see: a WMS implementation which is installable as a single binary app. You could open the data, style it, and once it was styled, you could serve that data — exactly as is — in any WMS client. The reason I want this is probably clear: this allows you to do OpenLayers development against a GIS application.

I think that Arc* are actually getting close to doing something like this, but that’s not a solution for me, since I’m looking primarily for something Open Source, and secondarily for free as in beer. Actually, even if it wasn’t free as in libre, I’d probably be happy with it.

One thing that’s hard to do right now is directly combine editing of GIS data and displaying it in a web mapping client. Certainly, one can see the uses that might lead to this: take an OpenLayers WMS setup, and you want to add data on top of it — perhaps you want to load a PostGIS datastore into QGIS, edit the points, and then immediately render the data into your webpage. If there were some GIS to provide a WMS against itself *directly* — not just via Apache or something else — you can skip a setup level of MapServer, or what have you.

MS4W is great, but it doesn’t include tools for creating geographic data. QGIS is great, but it doesn’t include tools for making it act as a WMS server. Maybe there are tools out there that do it — if so, maybe they’re Java, and we all know that I don’t touch that, but if it did this, I would.

I want to serve a WMS layer from a single GIS app running as a webserver on my local machine. What can do it? QGIS is apparently not the answer — you still need some CGI server to do the serving. So, what is it?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 4:16 am and is filed under FOSS4G 2006, Locality and Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.