[mapguide-users] How to display moving symbos on a map?

[Paul Spencer]

MapGuide is very powerful.  It is designed to be distributed over  
several servers (web tier, site server, optional support servers).   
It includes a lot of functionality for more traditional GIS  
capabilities such as feature manipulation, editing and creation.  You  
do not need any of this for the type of application you are  
considering (unless there are requirements you didn't mention).  The  
default viewer application does not have support for client-side  
plotting of point data using arbitrary images, so you would need to  
write quite a bit of code to retrieve your data, stuff it into a  
session-based feature source and regenerate the map image every time  
the data changed.  This would be both a lot of code and quite  
resource-intensive on the server (meaning you could not handle as  
much load).

The projects I mentioned ...

OpenLayers is configurable to use a wide variety of back end services  
for producing the map tiles, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,  
MapServer, ka-Map's tiling engine, WFS, GeoRSS, WMS (untiled and  
tiled) and the newer wms tile cache stuff - there are others too, and  
you can add support for anything else (such as MapGuide tiles for  
instance).

ka-Map is very much like OpenLayers, but will only work its own back  
end dynamic tile generation code (based on MapServer).

Both are designed to solve your kind of problem very efficiently and  
include functionality for client-side plotting of point data and  
moving it around in response to some external stimulus (such as a  
timed event to check for new data).  All the processing in this case  
happens on the client computer, reducing load on your server and  
providing a much snappier feeling application for the client.

Cheers

Paul


On 14-Dec-06, at 1:30 PM, Okeefe, Charlie ((Mission Systems)) wrote:

> Ok, thanks for the feedback. I'm curious why MapGuide might be
> 'overkill' for that job - is it harder to set up? Does it have extra
> pieces that have nothing to do with a browser-based map?
>
> Also, am I correct in thinking that the two projects you mention below
> require a back-end wms service such as MapServer to serve the map  
> tiles,
> while MapGuide is a complete package which includes that  
> functionality?
>
> Charlie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Spencer [mailto:pspencer at dmsolutions.ca]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 7:46 PM
> To: users at mapguide.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [mapguide-users] How to display moving symbos on a map?
>
> You can use MapGuide for this, but I think it would be a bit of
> overkill.  It sounds like you want to use a lighter-weight web client
> like OpenLayers (http://www.openlayers.org) or ka-Map (http://ka-
> map.maptools.org) ... this type of client provides tiled maps (ala
> google) and convenient functions for rendering client side features,
> especially point locations, and dynamically updating their location  
> and
> attributes (i.e. changing an image) without reloading the map etc.
>
> Cheers
>
> Paul
>
> On 13-Dec-06, at 3:15 PM, Okeefe, Charlie ((Mission Systems)) wrote:
>
>> Hello all, I'm interested in using MapGuide for a project, and the
>> basic requirement is fairly straightforward - an interactive world  
>> map
>
>> running in a web browser showing moving symbols whose locations are
>> given and updated by an outside service.
>>
>> I'm fairly new to a lot of the terminology involved here - from  
>> what I
>
>> have read thus far, it looks like I might want to do this with a WFS
>> server - each symbol we want to show becomes a "feature"
>> that can move when the service "updates" it.
>>
>> Am I on the right track here? Is MapGuide a good tool for this? If it
>> is, I'm interested in learning how to set up such an application.
>> Otherwise any suggestions on a better tool for the job would be
>> greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Charlie
>>
>
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> |Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
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> |Chief Technology Officer                                         |
> |DM Solutions Group Inc                http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ |
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+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
|Chief Technology Officer                                         |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ |
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