[postgis-users] [ANN] PostGIS on Rails, another take...

[Sean Gillies]

On Apr 20, 2006, at 8:21 AM, Robert Thau wrote:

> Hi.  I'm announcing yet another take on getting PostGIS working with
> Ruby on Rails.  Our goal (well, one of them) is to make it easy to
> arrange for web-based presentation of geographic data, with
> mouse-sensitive polygons, line-strings, and the like.  The code is
> still quite new, but it's to the point that other people may find it
> useful.  So, without further ado, the URL for the code:
>
>   http://ivygis.justec.co.in/
>
> and a demo:
>
>   http://ivygis.mgxkernel.com:3000/canada
>
> The demo requires Firefox 1.5 or IE6.  It's a tiled map, which you've
> seen before; the mouse sensitivity and highlighting of the parks
> polygons, and railroads, are (we hope ;-), a bit more unusual.  The
> data for the mouse-sensitive objects is being pulled live out of
> PostGIS, and processed for display as SVG or VML, whichever the
> browser supports --- just a simplify() for now, but more complicated
> transforms and queries would be easy to arrange.
>
> The background tiles are drawn by Mapserver, using Ruby MapScript, as
> is the non-interactive "Roads" layer.  (There's no point hitting the
> database for that).
>
> What's also nice is that you don't have to write a whole lot of code
> to achieve these effects.  The exact line count for the "Canada" demo
> keeps changing as I fiddle with the APIs, but the Mapserver config
> file controlling the background tile generation is still most of it.
>
> Development of this code has been supported by Japan Spatial
> Information Technology, Inc., and I've got their permission to release
> it on the same terms as PostGIS --- that is, GPLed.  (We may be
> switching to a less restrictive license later, as management permits,
> but it's GPLed for now).  We hope you have fun with it.
>
> Robert Thau
> rst at alum.mit.edu
>

Robert,

Nice work! How did you get PostGIS geometries to work with Active  
Record? Or do you work around?

Sean

---
Sean Gillies
http://zcologia.com