Sorry, this article is not available in english.

The advantages of such a system are those of typical webservice:

• fully decoupled from the GUI, the GUI could be written in any language that talks REST
• plain text mapfiles as the storage system

The service is being written in PHP and the RESTFUL part is managed with PHP Tonic library.

A few examples of typical URLs:

• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps – retrieve a list of mapfiles
• POST http://www.mymaps.com/maps – creates a new mapfile with the JSON data passed on post
• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.json – retrieve the map data as JSON
• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.xml – retrieve the map data as XML
• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.map – retrieve the map data as plain text mapfile
• PUT http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.json – alter the map with JSON data
• PUT http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.xml – alter the map with XML data
• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.xml/layers – retrieve the map layers as XML
• GET http://www.mymaps.com/maps/my_first_map.xml/layers/my_first_layer – retrieve the map layer data as XML

The MapServer development team has done a great job with this release.

The new AGG rendering engine allows an incredible high quality antialisaed output: the following two images are taken with MapServer 5 and MapServer 4 respectively.

See the change log.

For a complete guide to the new features and about migrating from previous versions, take a look at the MapServer 5.0 migration guide.

Talking about this import plugin, it is now almost complete in its first step, mapfile parsing, while I’m in the process of writing the persistance layer. After a few unsuccessfull tests, I decided not ot use php_mapscript for mapfile parsing, both direct import into a map object and the tokenizer had too many drawbacks, so I went for writing another regular expression parser again.

We discussed several times about how to make MapStorer code more maintainable, the actual code is a real mess, no structure, no patterns (not even a simple front controller), no functions!!! A maintainance nightmare. Finally, after the MDB2 DB abstraction layer I introduced a few months ago, we decided to implement an ORM (Object Relational Mapping). We decided to use PEAR’s DB_DataObject since it plays well with other PEAR packages and it’s very well documented and maintained. After a few troubles with the differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL versions, I’ve managed to implement this ORM almost completely, as usual I wrote several unit tests for the new code: I felt in love with test-driven programming long ago and never turned back.

A simple caching mechanism is also available, since for big vector layers, processing time can be an issue.
Raster layers are supported as network links to WFS MapServer.
Though more testing is required, the server is basically finished and fully functional.

See all the details >>

The script will build:

• GDAL
• PROJ
• GEOS
• MAPSERVER

How it works

First, all the libraries and mapserver will be downloaded from their official websites, then tey will be uncompressed and extracted on your disk, then they will be configured, built and installed one by one.

Important note: after copying and pasting the script from this page to your PC, you will have to change “ and ″ in ” in the script.

Note that you don’t have to run the script as root, run it as a normal user, you will be prompted for a password when needed. If your distribution doesn’t use the “sudo” system, just change all “sudo” commands in the script into “su -c “.

Prerequisites

Building from sources means you already have installed the compiler, its tools and the header files of all the main shared libraries (zlib etc.) and have a working toolchain for compilation from sources.

This was tested on Linux KUbuntu, Ubuntu server and Debian.

Configuration

After copying the script on the disk and making it executable, you should open it with an editor and change some configuration variables.

More detailed instructions are in the script comments.

If something goes wrong

First uncomment WGET in the code if you don’t want to download all files again, then check your paths and those configured or hardcoded in the script.

Chek also the parameters passed to the “configure” commands in the script, maybe you don’t need all those options.

Code

# Where to install: usually /usr or /usr/local
PREFIX=/usr
 
# Directory of PHP binary libs, in my case, was /usr/lib/php5/20051025/
PHPLIBDIR=/usr/lib/php5/20051025/
 
# Uncomment for a debug build of gdal library
#DEBUG_GDAL=1
 
# Activate download (deactivate if you have still downloaded)
WGET=1
 
# Libraries to fetch, configure, build and install
# Adjust versions according to your needs
GEOS="geos-3.0.0rc4"
GDAL="gdal-1.4.1"
PROJ="proj-4.5.0"
MAPSERVER="mapserver-4.10.1"
# Uncomment if you still have postgresql installed and want
# to build postgis, adjust paths in the last code block of this file
#POSTGIS="postgis-1.2.1"
 
if [ $GEOS ]; then
if [ $WGET = 1 && ! -f "$GEOS.tar.bz2" ]; then
wget http://geos.refractions.net/$GEOS.tar.bz2
tar -xjf $GEOS.tar.bz2
fi
 
cd $GEOS
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX
make clean
make
sudo make install
 
cd ..
fi
 
if [ $GDAL ]; then
if [ $WGET = 1 ]; then
wget http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/$GDAL.tar.gz
tar -xzf $GDAL.tar.gz
fi
 
cd $GDAL
if [ $DEBUG_GDAL ]; then
export CFG=debug
fi
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --with-mysql
make clean
make
sudo make install
cd ..
fi
 
if [ $PROJ ]; then
if [ $WGET = 1 ]; then
wget ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/proj/$PROJ.tar.gz
tar -xzf $PROJ.tar.gz
fi
 
cd $PROJ
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX
make clean
make
sudo make install
sudo cp $PREFIX/include/proj_api.h $PREFIX/lib
cd ..
fi
 
if [ $MAPSERVER ]; then
if [ $WGET = 1 ]; then
wget http://cvs.gis.umn.edu/dist/$MAPSERVER.tar.gz
tar -xzf $MAPSERVER.tar.gz
fi
 
cd $MAPSERVER
./configure \
--with-wfs \
--with-wfsclient \
--with-wmsclient \
--with-proj=$PREFIX/lib \
--with-geos=$PREFIX/bin/geos-config \
--with-gdal=$PREFIX/bin/gdal-config \
--with-ogr=$PREFIX/bin/gdal-config \
--with-php=/usr/include/php5 \
--with-mygis=yes \
--with-postgis \
--with-httpd=/usr/sbin/apache2 \
--prefix=$PREFIX
make clean
make
sudo cp mapserv /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
sudo cp shp2img $PREFIX
sudo cp shptree $PREFIX
sudo cp tile4ms $PREFIX
sudo cp mapscript/php3/php_mapscript.so $PHPLIBDIR
cd ..
fi
 
if [ $POSTGIS ]; then
if [ $WGET = 1 && ! -f "$POSTGIS.tar.gz" ]; then
wget http://www.postgis.org/download/$POSTGIS.tar.gz
tar -xzf $POSTGIS.tar.gz
fi
 
cd $POSTGIS
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX/lib/postgresql/8.1/
make clean
make
sudo make install
cd ..
fi

Il progetto, finanziato tramite un programma INTERREG dell’Unione Europea comprende partner Italiani e Svizzeri per quanto riguarda il cantone Ticino e Vallese.

La cartografia si basa sul rilievo della rete sentieristica tramite GPS e sul catasto sentieri del Club Alpino Italiano.

Il database contiene diverse centinaia di itinerari, escursionistici e alpinistici, centinaia di punti di interesse con le relative schede di dettaglio e un gran numero di strutture ricettive escursionistiche (rifugi e bivacchi) e non.

Le tecnologie utilizzate

Abbiamo realizzato il portale utilizzando il top dei prodotti open source disponibili per la pubblicazione su web della cartografia digitale:

• Mapserver
• POSTGIS
• p.mapper
• PHP5

Il sito web

Il sito è raggiungibile all’indirizzo www.vcoapiedi.net

Prerequisites

The script calls external programs such as gdalinfo and gdal_translate, hence you will need a working installation of gdal library and all the utilities that come with the library.

Overviews

If you also want to produce overviews at a given scale, comment out the exit line and add you desired scales to the “scales” array.


if($argc != 3){
die("Usage: {$argv[0]} filename desired_square_dimension_in_map_units\n");
}

Features

This plugin adds the following features:

• Pmapper configuration
• Automatic reference map

This plugin handles p.mapper 2.1.1 .ini configuration file. It also adds a
trigger on mapstorer export mapfile function that will keep p.mapper .ini
file and mapfile in sync.

Do not forget to export the mapfile and restart p.mapper to activate the new
configuration.

Configuration files for p.mapper are saved on a mapfile base: the mapfile name
({MAPFILE_NAME}) is used as a base for creating configuration directory
(called “project” in p.mapper slang).

The p.mapper .ini file will be saved as config_{MAPFILE_NAME}.ini and the
custom js and php files are saved in config/{MAPFILE_NAME}/ directory. These
directories must be writeable by the web server user.

Warnings

Warning: switching off layer queryability could provoke loss of data in case
you have set up a “real” template file path for the layer, in such case, the
content of the TEMPLATE field will be cancelled.

Warning: enabling automatic reference map creation, will overwrite existing
reference maps whenever you update map object record.

Warning: this plugin is ALPHA quality code (works for me), and is not
supported.

Download

Find it in the latest MapStorer SVN: www.mapstorer.org

It the last few months, ItOpen contributed to MapStorer project in the following areas:

• new PEAR::MDB2 database abstracion layer and PostgreSQL port
• complete rewrite of the configuration system
• implementation of the authentication system
• new AJAX based plugin system that allows to add new functionality without altering the core
• DB backup plugin
• PostGIS plugin
• many bug fix

After this big code contribution, ItOpen is now in the development team and a proud member of the steering comitee of MapStorer.