[OSGeo-Discuss] New Project.

[Cameron Shorter]

Bob, I'd like to mirror Paul and Christopher's comments.
There are a lot of browser based mapping clients available, many of them 
Open Source.

 From a user's point of view, this is confusing rather than useful.
"Should I get features A,B,C,D or A,C,E,G?"

Where possible, common libraries should be extracted from projects, 
allowing developers to focus on other problems.
However, emotionally it is hard to merge two or more projects. If two 
projects merge together, roughly half of each project code should be 
thrown away.

As Chris noted, Mapbuilder is in the process of merging OpenLayers into 
its codebase. This involves throwing away a lot of our original code, 
but at the same time, makes Mapbuilder a more robust product because we 
can focus on other areas.

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 02:22:37PM -0600, Bob Basques wrote:
>   
>> Paul,
>>
>> It's funny you put it the way you did.  From an Email exchange today
>> about how our project compares ti OpenLayers :
>>
>> This is how I see them as being different.  Others, feel free to chime
>> in.
>>
>> Moose has more of the Desktop GIS functionality and more tightly
>> integrated with MapServer. For example: measure, data popups, graphic
>> design skins, move layers, legends, printing, more configuration
>> options, identify, and select.  I don't think this type of
>> functionality
>> is the goal of OpenLayers, they strive more to make it easy to
>> integrate
>> multiple data sources.
>>     
>
> Although this is not in the goal of the *core* of OpenLayers, building
> the application on *top* of OpenLayers (assuming that you're searching
> for a web interface) is exactly what OpenLayers is targeted to. The
> examples directory of OpenLayers contains an example for how to do
> feature identification/query
> (http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/getfeatureinfo.html), and path 
> measuring is one of the tools that the new vector integration will allow
> us to build.
>
> Styling the OpenLayers UI and integrating it into a larger surrounding
> UI is also part of the design of the project:
> http://www.warwide.com/images/wwscreen/wwss_01.jpg shows, for example,
> an OpenLayers interface integrated into a war game.
>
> Moving layers is something that there is no existing UI for, but
> something that I would love to see, either as an example or as an
> external control. However, at the moment it is true that we're
> concentrating on how to get data into the interface.
>
> In general, OpenLayers seeks to create an API which can be used at the
> base level of any browser-based GIS application. MapBuilder has already
> begun to use the OpenLayers API to replace their existing map renderer,
> by building their tools around an OpenLayers Map created via that API.
>
> ka-Map may do something similar in the future. 
>
>   
>> OpenLayers strives to have easy support for numerous data sources like
>> Google, Yahoo, GeoRSS, and WMS.  Then they work off of the concept of
>> placing point markers and soon vector (line and polygon) on top of
>> those
>> data sources.  The also support tiled and untiled data sources in the
>> same interface.  This works very nice if your don't have a lot of
>> layers
>> that are changing all the time and you can make use of caching.  I
>> think
>> an interface like this would be pretty slow and hard to manage for a
>> organization like Douglas County, MN that is updating their parcels,
>> plats, E911 address points and roads every week.
>>     
>
> I'm not sure how you're going to be able to improve that -- I'd be
> interested to learn more about what you feel the challenges are that
> OpenLayers doesn't help you meet. 
>
>   
>> A more discrete description might be that MOOSE is shooting for the
>> customers that need to publish data in all sort of formats (and legacy
>> Systems), in a near Realtime fashion.  The intent is to make the process
>> as transparent to the Data publishers as it is to the Data users.
>>     
>
> I'm slightly confused, now. You mention 'publish their data', which to
> me, sounds like a server, rather than a client. Clients consume
> published data. OpenLayers is a client. Mapserver, GeoServer, 
> ka-Map, TileCache, WorldWind are servers. Which is MOOSE?
>
> Regards,
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254