[Geoserver-users] Who's using Geoserver (and for what)?

[davidblasby]

Well, it looks like Geoserver 1.3.0 ("the official release") is coming
out quite soon now. I've been very busy adding functionality,
ease-of-use, and stability. After all this hard work, what I'd like to
know is who is actually using Geoserver and what its being used for!

I'm busy working on my presentation for the OpenSource GeoSpatial
Conference (also known as MUM), and I'd like to mention a few projects.
I'd also like to know why you chose Geoserver over other products.

I'm actually quite interested in hearing about how the fruits of my (and
other's) labour are being used. Sometimes I feel it just gets sent out
to the ether and disappears.

So, if you're using Geoserver, please reply to this message and tell
myself and the rest of the people what you're using it for!

Thanks,
Dave

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[ianturton]

On 6/8/05, dblasby@anonymised.com <dblasby@anonymised.com> wrote:

I'm busy working on my presentation for the OpenSource GeoSpatial
Conference (also known as MUM), and I'd like to mention a few projects.
I'd also like to know why you chose Geoserver over other products.

I use it for teaching my masters course in Open Web Mapping. We also
use it for research and development of web mapping tools.

Ian
--

Ian Turton
http://www.geotools.org
http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk

[Alex_Petkov]

                                                                           
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             PM Subject
                                       [Geoserver-users] Who's using
                                       Geoserver (and for what)?
                                                                           
QOUTE:

Well, it looks like Geoserver 1.3.0 ("the official release") is coming
out quite soon now. I've been very busy adding functionality,
ease-of-use, and stability. After all this hard work, what I'd like to
know is who is actually using Geoserver and what its being used for!

I'm busy working on my presentation for the OpenSource GeoSpatial
Conference (also known as MUM), and I'd like to mention a few projects.
I'd also like to know why you chose Geoserver over other products.

I'm actually quite interested in hearing about how the fruits of my (and
other's) labour are being used. Sometimes I feel it just gets sent out
to the ether and disappears.

So, if you're using Geoserver, please reply to this message and tell
myself and the rest of the people what you're using it for!

Thanks,
Dave

And if anyone can provide a link with examples, that will be great!!!
I will write about how we use Geoserver a bit later.

Thanks,
Alex

[Arnulf_Christl5]

dblasby@anonymised.com wrote:

Well, it looks like Geoserver 1.3.0 ("the official release") is coming
out quite soon now. I've been very busy adding functionality,
ease-of-use, and stability. After all this hard work, what I'd like to
know is who is actually using Geoserver and what its being used for!

I'm busy working on my presentation for the OpenSource GeoSpatial
Conference (also known as MUM), and I'd like to mention a few projects.
I'd also like to know why you chose Geoserver over other products.

I'm actually quite interested in hearing about how the fruits of my (and
other's) labour are being used. Sometimes I feel it just gets sent out
to the ether and disappears.

So, if you're using Geoserver, please reply to this message and tell
myself and the rest of the people what you're using it for!

Thanks,
Dave

Hey,
we are using GeoServer in several projects. Seems like we are latecomers. We have comparably limited experience with GeoServer development issues as we are traditional MapServer users.

Here are two very different examples:

+++
We use GeoServer as WFS in the Ministry of Commerce of Rhineland Palatinate to return GML to the user. It is planned to extend the use as WFS-T to write back new digitized objects (currently Mapbender writes WKT directly to PostgreSQL/PostGIS).
The spatial data infrastructure contains one layer with 6.5 million land parcels, 750.000 farmland sections (wiht loads of alpha data) and 1.8 TB aerial photography which we render using UMN MapServer. It is not planned to drop MapServer and use GeoServer instead but to use both. MapServer for the high performance bulk stuff and GeoServer for the edit, query and sotrage stuff.
A partner company currently writes a tiny module which converts GML to Shapefiles so that people can query GeoServer not only for GML but can also obtain the data as Shape files to use in ArcPad when they are in the field. It will find its way back to GeoServer or geotools in time.

The Infastructure is currently open to 20.000 farmers who can digitize their land parcels to request for subventions granted by the European Union.

Find the demo site at
http://www.flo.rlp.de
It shows what the internal system does but uses much less data and a slightly different architecture than the productive system.

+++

We use GeoServer as WFS-T to provide a digitizing front end access for a registered association which helps to enhance safety for motorbikers. This is sort of a non-gov, no-money community project. The goal is to identify roads with safety fences in dangerous curves. The registered association then calcualtes the necessary funds to add underride protection and contacts and organizes sponsors. The system currently links into 11 different spatial data infrastructures for the backdrop data (all larger states in Germany).
GeoServers is used as WFS-T to store newly identified curves, which mostly are collected by the members by GPS or online digitizing in a map (thats a Mapbender there again). All new underride protection devices are also added to the map to show members where their fees are spent.

Very recently police departments and road maintenance staffs seems to be using this application to do whatever they might want to do. This is interesting insofar as only around 50 of the 2000 registered members actively use the Online system to add new data whereas last month we registered more then 1000 individuals from police departmente and maintenance staff using the maps. Seems like it fits better into their workflows than their own system...

+++

Not all is sunshine though, currently we are having a problem with the sheer size of the base geometry of 6.5 million polygons. UMN MapServer renders WMS fine and very fast. But both MapServer and GeoServer will not return a GML if it is requested with alpahnumerical attributing only. Both seem to be missing a bbox thus use the bbox of the Capabilities resulting in a full table scan, which simply flattens performance ot the database.

+++

People here regard GeoServer as a productive, stable Free Software (if you like it better: Open Source) environment which is one of the more efficient base components for operation in larger spatial data infrastructures.

The descision for GeoServer has been based on an evaluation on ease of use, installation and configuration, the vicinity to geotools, the large and friendly user community, helpful user lists and the Mapbuilder project that is tightly integrated and already provides some neat functionality we are still at implementing in Mapbender.

As with all Free projects it is still fairly difficult to get people to fund base development but it is getting better, last year we could fund a tiny development in UMN MapServer and the plan is to enhance funding management to be able to provide leverage more for development.

Thanks for all your good work and it definitely does not disappear in the ether - nonetheless roi is still not rolling very well. Maybe we could set up a profesional support and service agreement which reserves a share to be invested directly into base development like Refractions and Intevation do for PostGIS.

This would be something i'd like to discuss during and after our BOF meeting "How to be Managed by an Open Source Project" friday over lunch.

Best, Arnulf.

[Artie_Konin]

Greetings, Dave,

Thursday, June 9, 2005, you wrote:

Well, it looks like Geoserver 1.3.0 ("the official release") is coming
out quite soon now. I've been very busy adding functionality,
ease-of-use, and stability. After all this hard work, what I'd like to
know is who is actually using Geoserver and what its being used for!

Ok, in our organization (Tambov city's municipal computing center)
GeoServer is used to serve data collected by our GIS department. My
work is to write some sort of GIS client (both web-based and desktop)
for presentation of this data. Of course, it would be much simplier to
adopt some of the existing code, but they just want it to be closely
integrated with their communal databases so it is plain faster to
write all from the scratch then to navigate through labyrinths of
someone else's code. It is not likely that this work will be in public
access any time soon due to that stupid "security" considerations and
other ugly stuff.

I'm busy working on my presentation for the OpenSource GeoSpatial
Conference (also known as MUM), and I'd like to mention a few projects.
I'd also like to know why you chose Geoserver over other products.

That was out IT department chief who chose GeoServer to do the job,
and I can't be quite sure of his reasons. Personally I consider available
sources and Java as a programming language to be considerable
GeoServer's arguments. After all, why anyone will want to use heavy
and buggy commercial software which uses proprietary data formats and
data exchange interfaces of questionable quality when there is nice
lightweight open source alternative based on open standards around?

I'm actually quite interested in hearing about how the fruits of my (and
other's) labour are being used. Sometimes I feel it just gets sent out
to the ether and disappears.

Hm, judging by amount of mail traffic in this list it isn't very likely
In fact I think that GeoServer is a cool piece of software with a
great future. And, as a developer I should also note that it is a real
pleasure to look at your source code, people Not a common thing
nowadays.

--
WBR,
Artie

[jive]

Artie Konin wrote:

Greetings, Dave,

Thursday, June 9, 2005, you wrote:

Well, it looks like Geoserver 1.3.0 ("the official release") is coming
out quite soon now. I've been very busy adding functionality,
ease-of-use, and stability. After all this hard work, what I'd like to
know is who is actually using Geoserver and what its being used for!
   
Ok, in our organization (Tambov city's municipal computing center)
GeoServer is used to serve data collected by our GIS department. My
work is to write some sort of GIS client (both web-based and desktop)
for presentation of this data. Of course, it would be much simplier to
adopt some of the existing code, but they just want it to be closely
integrated with their communal databases so it is plain faster to
write all from the scratch then to navigate through labyrinths of
someone else's code. It is not likely that this work will be in public
access any time soon due to that stupid "security" considerations and
other ugly stuff.

Please consider the use of uDig ( plug plug ) - it has a strong plugin based system that you can use to implement your application (and avoid most of the GIS data wrangling). We have used it already for a couple clients, it is LGPL so you don't have to worry about making your changes public etc ....

Jody

Hm, judging by amount of mail traffic in this list it isn't very likely
In fact I think that GeoServer is a cool piece of software with a
great future. And, as a developer I should also note that it is a real
pleasure to look at your source code, people Not a common thing
nowadays.

This is interesting (I wrote some of the code in there), did you find any of the actual developer & design docs (http://vwfs.refractions.net/) useful? Or are you mostly a source code kind of guy ...

Jody

[Artie_Konin]

Greetings, Jody,

Friday, June 10, 2005, you wrote:

Ok, in our organization (Tambov city's municipal computing center)
GeoServer is used to serve data collected by our GIS department. My
work is to write some sort of GIS client (both web-based and desktop)
for presentation of this data. Of course, it would be much simplier to
adopt some of the existing code, but they just want it to be closely
integrated with their communal databases so it is plain faster to
write all from the scratch then to navigate through labyrinths of
someone else's code. It is not likely that this work will be in public
access any time soon due to that stupid "security" considerations and
other ugly stuff.

Please consider the use of uDig ( plug plug ) - it has a strong plugin
based system that you can use to implement your application (and avoid
most of the GIS data wrangling). We have used it already for a couple
clients, it is LGPL so you don't have to worry about making your changes
public etc ....

Yes, we in fact already thought on this :)) And just waiting for
release to try the uDig. And, if I'll be able to understand how to
incorporate all needed functionality into a plugin(s) it is very
possible that uDig will be used in there

Hm, judging by amount of mail traffic in this list it isn't very likely
In fact I think that GeoServer is a cool piece of software with a
great future. And, as a developer I should also note that it is a real
pleasure to look at your source code, people Not a common thing
nowadays.

This is interesting (I wrote some of the code in there), did you find
any of the actual developer & design docs (http://vwfs.refractions.net/)
useful? Or are you mostly a source code kind of guy ...

I'm recently becoming a latter, though that is not due to "call of
the heart" But "conventional" docs are not always available
readily. In fact, we are very much handicapped there by the heavy traffic
limitations, so online documentation is almost of no use to me.
Traffic overuse can easily put me (and others too) out of the web for
half a month. I rarely see the same page twice, saving the most
interesting/useful articles to disk. But this approach has some
serious drawbacks: such saved pages tends to "organize" themselves
into a sort of garbage heap, making hard to find needed data later,
and this html almost always requires a special manual processing
(stripping extra code such as menus and navigation bars and javascripts
that try to load external resources like banners, counters, images etc.)
That's definitely not a work I like to do Most disappointing is that
far too many sites (including jira and confluence at codehaus.org) have
very bad habit of not compressing their output. Near-250K "login" page
at jira simply kills me (they _do_ have separate "lightweight" page
consisting only of the login form, but it shows up only if the login
from the main page failed - can't really grok that logic).

So I prefer to work with offline docs, as I can go to the university
and download them during lunch time for future use. And the main sources
of information for me are this mailing list and offline GeoServer
documentation archive, which I download from time to time. Of course,
it would be much better to build docs from svn sources, but "document"
ant target never worked for me, always ending with NullPointerException
during execution of "generate-docbook". It might be something with my
xslt processor, I didn't investigated this matter yet.

Under this curcumstances the source code proves to be the last and
ultimate resort and if this code is written with proper care and
intended for people to read and not fot machine to execute (as in
GeoServer case) this sometimes becomes the fastest way of obtaining
needed information

BTW, I saw the link you provided severeal times in this list, but for
some reason didn't associated it with a source of useful information
about GeoServer. Thanks for pointing it out, I already bookmarked it
and will look through this site next time I become stuck

--
WBR,
Artie

[Chris_Holmes1]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, Artie Konin wrote:

Greetings, Jody,

Friday, June 10, 2005, you wrote:

>> Ok, in our organization (Tambov city's municipal computing center)
>>GeoServer is used to serve data collected by our GIS department. My
>>work is to write some sort of GIS client (both web-based and desktop)
>>for presentation of this data. Of course, it would be much simplier to
>>adopt some of the existing code, but they just want it to be closely
>>integrated with their communal databases so it is plain faster to
>>write all from the scratch then to navigate through labyrinths of
>>someone else's code. It is not likely that this work will be in public
>>access any time soon due to that stupid "security" considerations and
>>other ugly stuff.
>>
>>
> Please consider the use of uDig ( plug plug ) - it has a strong plugin
> based system that you can use to implement your application (and avoid
> most of the GIS data wrangling). We have used it already for a couple
> clients, it is LGPL so you don't have to worry about making your changes
> public etc ....

Yes, we in fact already thought on this :)) And just waiting for
release to try the uDig. And, if I'll be able to understand how to
incorporate all needed functionality into a plugin(s) it is very
possible that uDig will be used in there

>> Hm, judging by amount of mail traffic in this list it isn't very likely
>>In fact I think that GeoServer is a cool piece of software with a
>>great future. And, as a developer I should also note that it is a real
>>pleasure to look at your source code, people Not a common thing
>>nowadays.
>>
>>
> This is interesting (I wrote some of the code in there), did you find
> any of the actual developer & design docs (http://vwfs.refractions.net/)
> useful? Or are you mostly a source code kind of guy ...

I'm recently becoming a latter, though that is not due to "call of
the heart" But "conventional" docs are not always available
readily. In fact, we are very much handicapped there by the heavy traffic
limitations, so online documentation is almost of no use to me.
Traffic overuse can easily put me (and others too) out of the web for
half a month. I rarely see the same page twice, saving the most
interesting/useful articles to disk. But this approach has some
serious drawbacks: such saved pages tends to "organize" themselves
into a sort of garbage heap, making hard to find needed data later,
and this html almost always requires a special manual processing
(stripping extra code such as menus and navigation bars and javascripts
that try to load external resources like banners, counters, images etc.)
That's definitely not a work I like to do Most disappointing is that
far too many sites (including jira and confluence at codehaus.org) have
very bad habit of not compressing their output. Near-250K "login" page
at jira simply kills me (they _do_ have separate "lightweight" page
consisting only of the login form, but it shows up only if the login
from the main page failed - can't really grok that logic).

That is silly. Though if you're working from the same computer you should
be able to hit 'remember me' and it'll send a cookie and you don't need to
log in. I basically never log in to JIRA. Perhaps even if you were
moving computers you could hack the cookie and carry it on a flash disk
and add to whatever browser you're using.

So I prefer to work with offline docs, as I can go to the university
and download them during lunch time for future use. And the main sources
of information for me are this mailing list and offline GeoServer
documentation archive, which I download from time to time. Of course,
it would be much better to build docs from svn sources, but "document"
ant target never worked for me, always ending with NullPointerException
during execution of "generate-docbook". It might be something with my
xslt processor, I didn't investigated this matter yet.

Oh yeah, I _think_ the way to get this to work, if I remember correctly is
to copy the 'saxon.jar' from the XMLMind xml editor (what we use to edit
the docbook stuff), to your ant/lib directory. I think saxon is a common
library, so you probably can just find the jar. I think this is because
the docbook -> html generation code was taken from xmlmind, but I'm not
sure.

Under this curcumstances the source code proves to be the last and
ultimate resort and if this code is written with proper care and
intended for people to read and not fot machine to execute (as in
GeoServer case) this sometimes becomes the fastest way of obtaining
needed information

BTW, I saw the link you provided severeal times in this list, but for
some reason didn't associated it with a source of useful information
about GeoServer. Thanks for pointing it out, I already bookmarked it
and will look through this site next time I become stuck

--