Slashgeo

The OSGeo mailing list announced the maintenance release of MapServer 4.10.1. The changelog is found here. Here's how the popular open source webmapping application is described on the OSGeo website: "MapServer is an open source development environment for building spatially-enabled web mapping applications and services. It is fast, flexible, reliable and can be integratated into just about any GIS environment. Originally developed at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is now maintained by developers around the world."

I'd like your opinion on webmapping technology choice. The context is rather simple, my small team will produce a small prototype which must publish geospatial data on a website. The data is already processed and georeferenced. This is a tiny project but we want to choose the best long term webmapping solution possible. When I asked an internal (to the Canadian Government) mailing list about this, I surprisingly received numerous (and sometimes passionate) answers claiming either MapServer or MapGuide Open Source was best. I unexpectedly stumbled onto a sensible topic! From what I've been told, MapServer is fast, reliable, mature while MapGuide OS is easy to use and configure, modern (e.g. AJAX) and has higher scalability. Other opinions/facts for and against MapServer or MapGuide OS were shared along with several websites which demonstrate those technologies. Our webmapping server will run on Debian, therefore excluding ESRI's ArcIMS. Additionally, MapGuide is already operationally supported in my organization, this obviously favors MapGuide OS but does not exclude MapServer if it's really the best option! To be honest, I haven't took the time yet to do a complete assessment of the two avenues. That said, what's your opinion? Thanks!

pmarc writes "The event, named Encontro Nacional dos Usuários de Mapserver held during May, 9-11, in Brasilia, Brazil's capital. Circa 300 people attended the most important event devoted to open Geospatial technologies. During the event, held at the Presidential Palace Auditorium, an interim comitee was formed to formalize the Brazilian OSGeo chapter. OSGeo's Tyler Mitchell was there and left his impressions. Also there were ,Univali's Prof. Rafael Sperb, also from the Brazilian MapServer comunity and Geolivre Linux' Helton Uchôa. I hope they are to post their findings real soon now. The 3rd ENUM was sponsored by several companies and governamental agencies."

Over the Quantum GIS blog, the easy-to-use open source desktop GIS in active development, we learn about Quantum Navigator, a new open source routing / navigation system in the works. From the announcement: "The aim of the project is to enable basic routing and navigation capabilities on a roadmap. Given a shapefile of roadmap with correct format, you'll be able to select start and end point of your route. The application will calculate you a route that will meet your needs (shortest, fastest or economic path). This route should follow all restrictions like one-way streets or turning restrictions from one road to another one." I wonder if they're aware of the open source GMap, Roadster, and RoadNav efforts? Related to QGIS, there's a QGIS MapServer project in development, described as: "QGIS mapserver is a server module for geographic maps. The content of vector and raster datasources (e.g. shapefiles, gml, postgis, wfs, geotiff ) is visualized according to the request parameters. The generated map image is sent back to the client over the internet.".

Fernando Quadro writes "Who is initiating in the development of space solutions is very common the following questioning: Which server of maps is best? MapServer or GeoServer? Looking for to answer this question, I wrote an article showing some of the differences between MapServer and GeoServer." Fernando's points are interesting, I invite readers to see the previous story on choosing between MapServer and MapGuide Open Source and read the informative comments. I also copied a few related stories below.

The OSGeo-Announce mailing list informs us the GeoMoose open source webmapping project has released its version 1.2.0. From the GeoMoose website: "GeoMoose is a Web Client Javascript Framework for displaying distributed cartographic data. Among it's many strengths, it can handle large numbers of mapping layers, all mapping display is abstracted to separate layers. This allows for the abstraction of the maintenance and updating tasks as well. Since each display layer is abstracted in this fashion, it allows a site administrator to concentrate on running the overall system while leaving the data upkeep and publishing tasks to the respective data custodian. No more hand-off of the data to a "Publisher" is required, the data custodian can handle the publishing tasks on their own, including the frequency of updates." And on the extended page: "[...] GeoMoose is designed around the idea of using Web based URL services as an integration method. [...] GeoMoose is currently built as a front end to MapServer (CGI)." Main recent MapServer stories copied below.