Hello list!
Sorry, for the long post!
Some time ago I asked here about SVG support in OpenLayers and in GeoWebCache because I am going to implement a map client on the iPhone to do some investigation on automated-zooming navagation.
Due to limited capabilities (CPU, RAM) of an iPhone and the bandwidth I need the SVG to be as small as possible so I was looking for a map server that could output small and still rich and nice SVG. Well, I did not find any server which does this. There is SUASServer but the output SVG-T output I got was kind of strange because it was SVG with a lot of tiles containing PNG files. If you know some server with nice SVG, please let me know.
So I decided it would be nice to add SVG Mobile (Basic and/or Tiny profile) output format to GeoServer and before I start I want to know what you think and let you know my doubts:
- Shoud it be WMS or WFS service?
- On geoserver.org there are two tutorials on how to add custom output format
Create your own Output Format
Creating a WFS Output Format
In what way are they different? If I decide for WFS which approach should I use?
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my biggest concern using geoserver is that I am afraid I can’t make use of the PostGIS function AsSVG() where I could optimize output by setting relative coords and limit precision.
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For my purpose I guess I would use SVG Basic instead of Tiny because Tiny profile does not support textpath element which is nice for street names.
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A gzip output would also be nice to reduce the file size
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Since I need a lot of map data to test navigation I would like to import OSM data (OpenStreetMap) into the PostGIS database. I know the tables of OSM are a mess, but I just need the name from the FeatureInfo (eg. city and streetnames) GeoFabrik offers shapefiles which can be imported into PostGIS easily via shp2psql
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If everything works fine i might take a look at SVG tiling support in GeoWebCache as Andrea stated that it should be generally possible, altough as soon as SVG Basic Output is ready I have to implement that iPhone client.
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Does anyone know by chance what is faster to render for the webkit SVG renderer: absolute or relative path coords?
I would love to do my developing as nice as possible so it might be possibly reused in Geoserver in the future if there is interest in it.
You might have noticed, that I am not an experienced GIS developer. I have no problem programming Java but I am new to all this GIS stuff.
Thanks a lot for any comments
Ivo
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (Berlin)
(doing my diploma project there)