[OpenLayers-Users] Edit shapefiles using editing toolbar

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 02:21:52PM -0600, Lance Dyas wrote:
> Does anyone know enough to compare FeatureServer and Geoserver?

FeatureServer is a Python-CGI, simple to set up, easy to have use OGR
datasources, deployable on Apache. It's lightweight, simple, and
designed for integration into OpenLayers via RESTful feature access.
It is configured via a text file, and only serves features, but serves
them in a number of vector formats.

GeoServer is a mature, Java-based application, which is trivial to
deploy on Apache Tomcat. It has a supremely high quality WFS
transactional interface, and supports some different formats, but
primarily only works via WFS and WFS-T. It is configured via a web
interface primarily, has support for ESRI Arcsomething or other, and
also can act as a WMS. 

FeatureServer is lightweight, RESTful, and designed with the web in
mind. 

GeoServer is heavier, and designed with and around OGC standards; it is
slightly less flexible/hackable, but much more mature.

If you need to hack some feature editing together with OpenLayers, use
FeatureServer. If you have to work with GIS-like data in a GIS-like
environment, use GeoServer... but be aware that it will take some doing
to get WFS-T-based feature editing into OL. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta