[mapserver-users] Announcing the new MS4W

Thu Oct 1 14:21:19 PDT 2015

First of all, very nice work on MS4W. Maybe the next time I give a demo for
AWS, I will flip from my Ubuntu based instances running on EC2 to Windows.
In the interest of getting more people access to all of this effort,
especially new users, I am wondering how much interest there is out there
in automated/scripted way to run Mapserver on AWS? Not just a Mapserver VM
(AMI), but going further, trying to get to Jukka's point about getting it
to 'just work'. Most of the work I am doing has to do with imagery or
LiDAR, so I am thinking along the lines of once you get it up and running
you can do something like load a new set of geotiffs in S3 and then
underlying event driven process would add that to the vrt or shapefile
index and it would just show up on the next WMS query.
Something like

WFS or WMS/WMTS request -- CloudFront (CDN) -- ELB (Load Balancer) -
Autoscale Group of Mapservers --
pointed at PostGIS (running on our managed db service RDS)  and S3 for
geotiffs.

The demo S3 bucket could hold any amount of open data shared across n # of
demo deployments/accounts.
The Postgres db could contain OSM, with some mechanism to keep it updated
once a day.
This would be the kind of data that would NOT fit on a USB stick.

Nothing really new here in this idea. In fact here is deck Matt Walker put
together back in 2012 that illustrates some of this.
https://speakerdeck.com/walkermatt/building-a-national-tile-server
If I were to add a point here, it would just be that we are now at a point
where anybody should be able to deploy a national map server in minutes,
mainly because you don't have the ETL bottleneck around data and you can
use devops techniques to make standing up complex stuff a lot easier.
However, all that is not so useful unless it is easy to get your own data
working.
-Mark

On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 1:04 AM, Rahkonen Jukka (MML) <
jukka.rahkonen at maanmittauslaitos.fi> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The add-ons are great work. However, my point is that without doing any
> additional installations the best that a new Mapserver user can achieve is
> "No query information to decode. QUERY_STRING is set, but empty." while
> everybody who has installed Geoserver can read WMS GetCapabilities from
> http://localhost :8080 and either add the service to any WMS or play with
> the demo viewer:
>
> http://demo.opengeo.org/geoserver/topp/wms?service=WMS&version=1.1.0&request=GetMap&layers=topp:states&styles=&bbox=-124.73142200000001,24.955967,-66.969849,49.371735&width=780&height=330&srs=EPSG:4326&format=application/openlayers
>
> I still think that the best marketing we could do for Mapserver would be
> to offer an immediate out-of-box experience for Mapserver users on any
> platform "Hey, it makes maps! "
>
>
> -Jukka Rahkonen-
>
> Jeff McKenna wrote:
>
> >  Hi Jukka,
>
> > Speaking of that, I spent a considerable amount of time for this release
> setting up the MS4W add-ons for this version (MapServer 7).  Actually this
> does handle the needs you mention.  Such as OGC: well there is an MS4W
> add-on named "MapServer OGC Workshop" that contains so many links to
> services and working mapfiles (all working for MapServer 7).  Need full
> applications working with MapServer 7? : well there is GeoMOOSE (latest
> release) or Mapbender (latest release), all ready for you to use with
> MS4W.  Looking for the original (as in Steve Lime's CGI demo), it works now
> with MapServer 7 even, as an MS4W add-on, named "MapServer Itasca Demo
> Application". :)
>
> In total there is over 500 MB of working mapfiles, data, applications
> ready to get you going.
>
> Give them a try: http://www.ms4w.com/download.html
>
> See you on the new MS4W list.
>
> -jeff
>
>
>
> --
> Jeff McKenna
> MapServer Consulting and Training Services
> http://www.gatewaygeomatics.com/
>
> On 2015-09-23 11:39 AM, Rahkonen Jukka (MML) wrote:
> > Hi Jeff,
> >
> > That will be great. I am sure that Mapserver has frightened away
> thousands of new users because it is so difficult to make the very first
> map.  Just compare it with Geoserver that comes with the data_dir and fine
> collection of readymade demo services and layers. It is not so easy to make
> Mapserver demos which would work out-of-the box on both Windows and Linux,
> but making it to work in MS4W will be a good start.
> >
> > -Jukka-
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Alkuperäinen viesti-----
> > Lähettäjä: Jeff McKenna [mailto:jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com]
> > Lähetetty: 23. syyskuuta 2015 4:18
> > Vastaanottaja: Rahkonen Jukka (MML)
> > Aihe: Re: [mapserver-users] Announcing the new MS4W
> >
> > Hi Jukka,
> >
> > Great idea, actually I have something ready from a workshop that can
> > be used.  Will add it with the upcoming GDAL 2.0.1
> >
> > -jeff
> >
> >
> >
> > On 2015-09-22 10:40 AM, Rahkonen Jukka (MML) wrote:
> >> Hi Jeff,
> >>
> >> I believe that MapServer should offer an immediate "It works"
> experience for new users. Could you consider to include some demo data and
> mapfiles into the standard delivery of MS4W? They could be placed for
> example into \apps\demo.  Once they are there we could have WMS GetMap
> links with &FORMAT=image/png and &FORMAT=application/openlayers on a
> visible place of the html page that opens from http://localhost.  Or the
> OpenLayers map could even be included on the start page by default.
> >>
> >> If you think it is a good idea I can make some first few mapfiles on
> top of Natural Earth countries. It seems to mean about 5 MB extra as zipped
> but I do believe that it would be worth it.  I could start with these:
> >>
> >> - Hello world WMS - simple but still complete with enough WMS metadata,
> and naturally debug and ms_errorfile.
> >> - WMS with some styling
> >> - WMS with labels
> >> - WMS with GetFeatureInfo
> >> - WFS
> >>
> >> I could also write a short document about how to get the first map with
> shp2img, browser, and with a few GIS program.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> -Jukka Rahkonen-
> >>
> >>
> >> Jeff McKenna wrote: Announcing the new MS4W
> >>
> >>> Hi everyone!
> >>
> >>> Just in time for FOSS4G-Seoul, I'm very proud to announce the new
> MS4W[1]  MS4W is thriving, as you can see by its long history[2] of
> releases, and the last few months has seen a lot of development.  Much
> thanks goes to Tanya Haddad for her support for this release, it has been
> quite an effort updating the full stack (the number of libraries updated
> and added is large as you see in the recent history).
> >>
> >>> You'll also note that there has been releases happening, we just
> needed a new home for people to find them.  It's quite exciting to live at
> ms4w.com now, and you'll also notice that we have been using a new
> tracker[3] which has been working well (please feel free to use it).
> >>
> >> You may also notice that releases now have a Roadmap[4], every 3 months
> with dated milestones, and you can follow along the exact changes coming
> through the tracker link on that page.
> >>
> >> This 3.1.0 release has some tasty features, including optimized
> >> Apache 2.4, MapServer 7.0, PHP 5.4.45, all mapscripts, Oracle
> >> support, MapCache
> >> 1.4.0 (with GDAL support), TinyOWS 1.1.1, spatialite/OSM utilities, and
> many many more goodies.  New users might like to start at the features[5]
> page to review.
> >>
> >> Finally we have moved to a new mailing list (I haven't been able to
> >> post to my own old MS4W mailing list for almost 2 years now): please
> >> join, as all releases will be announced and support given through the
> >> new MS4W list[6] So, I'll cya there! :)
> >>
> >> Thanks so much everyone, I am quite excited.
> >>
> >> [1] http://www.ms4w.com/
> >> [2] http://www.ms4w.com/HISTORY.html
> >> [3] http://www.ms4w.com/trac/
> >> [4] http://www.ms4w.com/roadmap.html
> >> [5] http://www.ms4w.com/features.html [6]
> >> http://lists.ms4w.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ms4w-users
> >>
> >> -jeff
> >>
> >>
> >
>
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