[postgis-users] PostGIS websites in PHP without a map server?

[John Patterson]

Greetings all,

I'm new to the open source GIS community after working at Esri for a
couple of years, and I've been having a great time exploring all the
available FOSS GIS software. I'm working on building a few websites
with basic GIS functionality, and I'm trying to do as much as I can to
maintain compatibility with "commodity" web hosts and use as little
specialized software as possible. I've written some proof-of-concept
PHP code to grab PostGIS geometry with ST_AsGeoJSON and put it into an
OpenLayers page. This works fine, although I haven't looked at
efficiency/scalability yet.

I would be interested in hearing about any (positive or negative)
experiences you've had with this combination, and any information on
existing tools for PostGIS and PHP or other web languages. I'm not
finding much from a Google search. I don't pretend that I could
replace map services in general, but I think there are use cases where
a PHP mapping library would work well.

Thanks,

John Patterson