Gerald,
Well, I'm new to this particular list, but I see some familiar faces around (hi Rob!) so I guess I'll just jump in.
You asked:
- Is OpenGIS standard and Geoserver WFS server well suited for this kind of specific mapping application?
Assuming that you don't want to take on a proprietary (and expensive!) de-facto style standard, OpenGIS stardards give you a huge head-start in terms of defining well-known interfaces, strong object-model ideas, XML schemas, community support, and multiple working/actively-developed server-side implementations.
You asked:
- Is there any team working on a client actively (I've seen request on Jira and some few suggestions for a WMS client, and Geoclient is not really developed anymore)? or should we start one from scratch?
There are a couple of clients that I'm aware of.
* J2ME OGC WMS Client is at http://www.boege.net/wmsclient_en.html
* The folks at Traverse Technologies have some well-developed client libraries in Swing/Java2d at http://fulcrum.traversetechnologies.com. These fulcrum libraries have some integrated feature editing/topologically-constrained feature-editing components, too. So if you're ever looking to solve the never-ending problem of "distributed updates to my featurestore", there's a starting point to look at.
Good luck!
--saul
-----Original Message-----
From: GB2G [mailto:ggb2g@anonymised.com]
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 7:11 AM
To: geoserver-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Geoserver-devel] client for Geoserver and Utlities map
Hi all,
I am pretty new to geoserver and I am still reading all relevant documents (including OpenGIS docs since we are not map experts) to better understand the platform but first I want to congratulate you guys for this excellent software.
With a group of university students (java and other programming skills) we are thinking about using GeoServer to serve as a base for a GIS with an SVG for, in a first step, a read-only client.
The target at first would be small utilities such as electricity or water companies, therefore we are talking about network map such as low voltage cable or water pipes. We believe this could benefit to a lot of small utilities that much of the time cannot afford to pay for big propriatory solutions.
We could not find an open-source solution for this specific area that's why we are thinking to use Geoserver as a base to read shapfile and/or connect to PostGIS/MySQL.
We did a quick and dirty internal proof of concept based on PHP and MySQL4.1, PHP was delivering direct SVG (from MySQL4.1) to the browser and it works quite well with very good respond time although we already have over 30.000 features (electric cables, substations...). This test (as well as looking at the current GIS market) show us that SVG was the way to go to improve readibility and many other aspects (the old raster vs vector data discussion!).
Now, to take this to a next step, we believe that GeoServer could be a very good base (of course we will respect the license!).
GML and SVG
We are also wondering whether we should transform the GML on the server side or on the client side (as it is currently in GeoClient). For the sake of speed I will intend to do that on the server side (but breaking as such the WFS).
WFS seems more appropriate than WMS although the late one can deliver SVG but does not interact as such on the feature level.
Client
Another point is that to my knowledge there is not yet a working version of an open source client with GeoServer. Our first objective is probably to develop one (most probably based on GeoClient) to work correctly with GeoServer.
Here are a few questions before we make a wrong decision!:
- Are you aware of any solutions in this area (of course open source!)?
- Is OpenGIS standard and Geoserver WFS server well suited for this kind of specific mapping application?
- is hard to find on the usermap a live example using geoserver, any good reference?
- Is there any team working on a client actively (I've seen request on Jira and some few suggestions for a WMS client, and Geoclient is not really developed anymore)? or should we start one from scratch?
- I still do not understand very well how a datastore is working. Here is my understanding (only for database) : each FeatureType should have its own table in a database. This table has a FeatureID as primary key and a Geometry field. For the rest of the table it can be specific attributes for each FeatureType such as the size, topology or connectivity for electric cables. Am I correct? How geoserver can use them (if even possible)?
Ok, I stop here, my email is already too long! But be sure that we are interested to participate to this project.
Gerald
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