[OSGeo-Boston] Switching From ArcIMS to "something else"

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 04:54:14PM -0500, Saul Farber wrote:
> Actually, MassGIS has done a pretty good job of using FOSS in a 'hybrid'
> way and the use of geoserver with ArcSDE is fairly well supported.

Right, sorry: I wasn't being specific enough. *I* don't know how to use
ArcSDE with FOSS well :) But you do! that's why community is good ;)

MapServer can read vector and raster data from ArcSDE... but the
CGI-style nature of MapServer means you need to use atypical  modes of
operation, which results in a more difficult user experience. GeoServer,
on the other hand, is not a CGI-style setup, so it works better for
this.

-- Chris

> My take on how to 'web-enable' an ArcSDE based storage would be
> something like this:
> 
> 1)  Install GeoServer
> 2)  Install the GeoServer ArcSDE support
> 3)  Pick which layers you want to serve and create 'featuretypes' for
> them in GeoServer
> 4)  Create styles for each featuretype (perhaps using udig's SLD editor)
> 5)  Apply the styles to the featuretypes
> 6)  Go use the built-in openlayers 'demo client' to see your data.
> 7) (optional) hit 'save source...' on your demo client page and start
> hacking!
> 
> 
> --saul
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 10:01 -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> > So, I got 3 personal (count 'em, 3) emails yesterday on what to switch
> > away from an ArcIMS server solution to. Since I hate answering anything
> > in private (shared knowledge > non-shared knowledge), I thought I'd
> > address them here, since I know that a fair number of the local people
> > work in/around MIT, which uses (as I understand it) ArcIMS to do their
> > WMS-style work.
> > 
> > The first question to answer when switching away from an ESRI-based
> > solution is what type of data you're serving from. Moving away from ESRI
> > can be hard if you've got all your data in a giant ArcSDE database --
> > not impossible, but it makes things more difficult. If, on the other
> > hand, you have things like shapefiles, then it may make the switch
> > easier.
> > 
> > Next, figure out what you want to do with the data: Do you want to serve
> > it up to GIS clients (ArcGIS, etc.)? Do you want to create a web
> > interface? Do you want to help people to create mashups? Do you want to
> > let users edit it? etc. 
> > 
> > If I were to take something like MIT's 'whereis' map datasource, I would
> > probably (personally) do something like:
> >  * Dump the data to a PostGIS interface
> >  * Load it up into MapServer (this requires converting the existing
> >    style information into MapServer's mapfiles, which is possibly
> >    time-consuming)
> >  * Set up a WMS against that, using MapServer
> >     * This will be used by clients who consume WMS, a la ArcGIS/qgis
> >  * Set up TileCache in front of it, picking a small number of
> >    projections that are acceptable to pre-cache. I'd probably just build
> >    this on a machine with lots of disk: it seems unlikely that you'd get
> >    more than 100GB of cache even with three different layers. These
> >    TileCache layers are 'basemaps' -- you probably want EPSG:4326 (for
> >    most 'unprojected' maps), EPSG:900913/SphericalMercator (for use with
> >    Google Maps), and the local projection (for local-only maps).
> >  * Use OpenLayers to load the relevant layers into a map
> >  * Use either a small overlay WMS layer or OpenLayers vector support to
> >    display selected features and the like.
> >  * Stand up FeatureServer, with attribute querying on useful attributes,
> >    to get WFS-like services for GeoJSON, GeoRSS-Atom, KML, etc. This can
> >    also have read-write layers for user input. 
> >  
> > Then, you document all these things and see who comes along and uses
> > them :)    
> > 
> > Specific use cases, of course, matter. If your primary goal is to make
> > data available for use in ArcGIS, this might not work for you. But
> > MapServer (5.0) + TileCache + OpenLayers makes a great, fast map
> > browser: see http://boston.freemap.in/ for an example of my personal
> > attempts at that.
> > 
> > Regards,
> 
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-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer