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

[Okeefe, Charlie (Mission Systems)]

Thank you Paul (and thanks also to Jason and Brad) for your very helpful
answers. I'm looking at OpenLayers and it looks very interesting and
useful for what I want to do.

Charlie 

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Spencer [mailto:pspencer at dmsolutions.ca] 
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 6:28 AM
To: users at mapguide.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [mapguide-users] How to display moving symbos on a map?

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
>>
>
> +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
> |Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
> +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
> |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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