Mapbender (was: GDV Client)

[Arnulf Christl]

Lester Caine wrote:
[...]
>> http://www.mapbender.org
>
>
> Because I had not found it yet ?

Hi,
i am the project admin and most of the time i have a bad feeling for
promoting Mapbender everywhere because the worst thing you can do is be
a pain in the ass by producing spam.

We already infested SourceForge, maptools.org, berlios platforms and
MapServer, Chameleon, OpenSDI, FreeGIS, OpenGeoDB, Geowanking user
mailing lists, Wikipedia and Mediawiki and have it referenced at the
OGC. Mapbender is up and running under the GPL for almost 2 years now.
Where else do you propose to promote new Free Software projects? We cant
afford TV commercials although i believe that could be really funny.

> There is a lot of good stuff out there, but it is buried under twice as
> many dead ends and bad links. Even the 'Demo Server' link on mapbender
> does not seem to do anything :(

Works fine for me using FireFox (though newer versions are bad crashers
:-( ), MS IE and Opera (new version) on Windows 2000/3 XP, Ubuntu,
FreeBSD, Debian, Mandrake/driva, SuSE. Tell me whats wrong & we have a
look into it.
Xenu reports not one dead end on Mapbender.org. All Mapbender interfaces
on this site are in constant state of flux - conceded. This is not a
productive environment but a place to show, learn, experiment and
discuss. Go to the gallery to find some productive environments or google.

> Like other people *I* would like a live coordinate display on the
> client, jBox put me off because it says 'java' and I have enough fun
> with PHP and Javascript after 25 years of C/Pascal/Algol programming :)

Want the coordinates like it is done here:
http://wms1.ccgis.de/mapbender2/frames/login.php?name=mb&password=mb&mb_user_myGui=gui
Newest feature there: the precision of the selected coordinate reflects
on the scale you are working in. The further you zoom in, the more
precision you get. Nice feature we missed on most clients so far and you
badly need it for online editing, measuring and digitizing.

> The final piece of the jigsaw - I prefer to work in Firebird for SQL
> since the last 15 years worth of data are stored there, and we have 5
> years 'experience' of 24/7 operation without a single problem. So I need
> to be able to get to a point I can add 'FirebirdGIS' ;)
> ( See
> http://home.lsces.co.uk/ibWebAdmin_0_98/FirebirdFederationDataArchive.html
> for a source of useful location information :) )

Does that mean you would want to extend Mapbender to use FireBird as
admin database? You are welcome - go ahead. Need access to the CVS,
prove yourself and ask for it.

We are currently implementing a wrapper for PostgreSQL (our favorite DB)
and it presents us with problems not anticipated (something that never
happens to any developer ever) and will keep us busy for a few more days.

>> Some examples:
>>
>> http://www.terrestris.de/hp/en/con_demo.php
>
> Better than the 'Demo Server' ;)

Would be great if you could point us to what exactly is not working
fine. This demo shows a lot more than just OGC WMS maps, you can
dynamically search, load and highlight postcodes as GML - something we
were quite proud of until you said its no good...

:-)

Just out of interest:
If the GDV client is the "GDV Mapserver Client" promoted on
http://www.gdv-gis.de/ then it is freeware, not Open Source. We already
had some discussions about this...

GDV-MapBuilder is proprietary (and has nothing in common with the Free
MapBuilder WFS-T JavaScript client shipped with GeoServer - something
you might want to have a look at too).

WARNING: personal POV!
In our opinion everybody using Free Software *and* building a business
model on top should also promote it. Not only the top 1% freeware client
but the underlying 99% architecture with MapServer, operating system,
web server, spatial database...

WARNING: business model
If you are ESRI partner you should *not* promote any Open Source *ever*
because else you will be thrown out of the partner program. Examples abound.

Best,

> --
> Lester Caine
> -----------------------------
> L.S.Caine Electronic Services


--
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Arnulf B. Christl
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http://www.ccgis.org
http://www.mapbender.org
http://wms1.ccgis.de/ewiki
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