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ABOUT: This entry was posted April 6, 2007 at 10:50 p.m. It is 651 words long, which, in case you're curious, translates to about 18 inches. There are currently 0 comments on this post. Click here to add your own.

SUMMARY: In which I begin to explain the benefits of MapServer, an open source alternative to ArcIMS.

TAGS: GIS


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Open source GIS with MapServer, part one

Posted Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 10:50 p.m.

In my continuing effort to push an new CAR technologies at work, I recently started exploring MapServer – the open source cousin of ArcIMS most commonly known for taking the patience of God to install.

I’ve been playing with it for about two weeks now, and I am decidedly impressed. Check out some of the cool stuff the Minnesota DNR has been putting together. Or LAPD. Or whoever these guys are.

Detailed layering. AJAX integration. For all the cash they’ve dropped on ArcIMS, newspapers haven’t even come close.

For my part, I’ve dummied up a little something of my own. It’s modest compared to the uber apps above, but it only took a couple hours to build. If nothing else, it showed me that MapServer isn't impossible. And over the next few blog posts, I’ll try to prove it.

Web mapping in the newsroom

First a little background. Most maps featured on newspaper Web sites come in three packages: Google/Yahoo, ArcIMS and HTML ImageMapper. The former handles quick-hits and point maps, and the latter two handle more robust applications.

ArcIMS is the granddaddy. It’s huge, expensive, temperamental and can drive almost any application a newsroom can dream up. Being an ESRI product, it integrates nicely with ArcView, making it a user-friendly solution for anyone who doesn’t like to custom compile their software before they run it.

ImageMapper is the cheaper, uglier stepchild of ArcIMS. It also integrates with ArcView, but as an extension that outputs a bunch of JavaScript and HTML and handles most of its processing on the client side. The newest version, which retails for about $2,000, comes with AJAX support.

Both are good solutions, but they’ve also got their warts. ArcIMS is unnecessarily expensive for what most of us use it for, and ImageMapper is limited. Both count on proprietary extensions to enhance functionality. They’re good for what they are, but they sacrifice freedom for user-friendliness.

I’m a big believer in there being as few roadblocks as possible between concept and execution. If I have an idea, I want to sit down right then and make it happen, without having to buy any new packages or extensions before I get started. For high-end mapping on the Web, MapServer is my golden ticket.

Say hello to MapServer

MapServer is the open source cousin of ArcIMS and ImageMapper, invented by some wizards at the University of Minnesota. It takes shapefiles and other types of geographic data and renders them into to a browser, from which users can then click, pan, zoom and do a lot of the other cool stuff GIS clients typically facilitate.

It’s also free, as are its myriad extensions, many of which work through MapServer’s scripting API called MapScript. The aforementioned AJAX toolkit, called Ka-Map, uses MapScript’s PHP implementation, but the API has been translated into Perl, Python and other languages as well.

As far as I can tell, MapServer performs all the CAR tricks of ArcIMS or ImageMapper and then some. If you conquer its initial learning curve, you’ll find that it often beats ArcIMS in performance tests. If you compile it with FastCGI support, it scoots along even quicker

The big down-side, as with most open source software, is a lack of official support. You install it, you fix it. It also counts on a whole host of dependencies, which I'll explain in a later post. Neither of those come with support, either, so you're really on your own. To some people, IT guys especially, that can be a huge problem.

Next time …

Whenever MapServer is mentioned on NICAR-L, the discussion quickly turns to how hard it is to install. Next time, I’ll try to walk through that maze on a Linux (specifically CentOS) machine. If you don’t know squat about the command line, now might be a good time to learn …

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