Getting started with OpenLayers

In the world of open source web mapping interfaces, the biggest and most robust one is OpenLayers. OpenLayers was first released in 2006 by MetaCarta Labs. After 2007, it became an OSGeo project maintained by the OpenLayers Developer Team. It is still under development in these days. The two well-known and widely used branches of this project are OpenLayers 2 and OpenLayers 3. The third version was officially released this year (August, 2014.), and OpenLayers 3.1 has been announced. This also means, that OpenLayers 2 got out of development and the current version is its final form. OpenLayers 3 on the other hand is under constant development, so applications written with it may require frequent maintenance. In return we will get an interface armed with the capability of using up-to-date formats (e.g. TopoJSON), having beautifully rendered maps (WebGL) or in the future providing 3D maps (based on Cesium).

Web mapping interfaces

When you start to develop your web GIS application, the first consideration will be the the interface you wish to work with. There is a wide range of open source GUIs. There are a lot of similarities in them, like they are written in JavaScript (the library which you will use to publish your maps if not the whole software), they use similar sets of values, they use similar methods to reach servers or handle geospatial data. There are lot of comparisons between various GUIs, but in reality there isn't such a thing like best and worst interfaces. Well, maybe there are worse ones, but I won't write about all of them. I will show some of the most popular ones, without attempting to be comprehensive. This post will be a prelude to using these interfaces, showing general considerations and methods to use them.

Map server basics

If you would like to build your own map server, you have to think it through carefully first. Do you need a complete map server or you can stack with an existing one? Is Google Maps good for you or you need more control on your maps? There are several options on the internet and with some of them, you just have to write a brief JavaScript code and voilà, you have a well-visualized map. In the next few articles I will show some options which won't need an independent map server, but learning at least one of them will be inevitable if you have to build one.

Apache optimization for a map server

The previous article covered most of the basics installing a simple Apache web server. With a working web server setup, you can make more specific considerations for a map server. There are simpler cases, like what kind of content you would like to serve or what kind of scripts and programs you will need. If you don't want an audiovisual wonder with something like flash, then the content mostly will consist of images and plain text. On the scripting side you will surely need JavaScript and Python. You may use some kind of shellscript on your way to build a map server, but you don't have to put any extra effort in optimizing that part. A bit more complicated list of considerations are, how to optimize the web server itself. You have to choose and set up the best MPM, set up privileges to various directories, choose the modules you have to use and throw away the unwanted ones, all in all, fine-tune the whole system.

Just for fun - ArnoldC

In these days programming skills became one of the most useful and well payed skills in the labor market. People working in the area know, that learning some popular programming languages can ease your life. You will benefit from it in your work, but you can make some of your everyday task easier, too. For example when you have a bunch of digital music albums in FLAC format and the name of the tracks are Track1, Track2, and so on, you can spend half of your day renaming them one at a time or you can just write a little script to do it for you in a few seconds.

There are a vast amount of programming languages out there. Some of them are specialized, good or just lucky enough to get in the spotlight. There are useful programming languages for writing binary or script codes, developing websites, learning the basics, and there are the languages written just for fun. They are typically useless, harder to program with and are messing with your brain, but they have one common feature: they are fun to program with. I've bumped into one of these languages recently: the ArnoldC.

Creating an Apache web server

Now that you have a working Linux distribution on a server computer it's time to initialize a web server framework. The Apache 2 is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol web server program. It is highly optimizable and modular. This article will help you through the installation process of Apache 2.2 on Debian 7 and Apache 2.4 on Fedora 20. The default layout and command usage in those distributions are slightly different. In the first place I will show some general configuration options, then I'll continue with the distribution specific installation process. Note that some dissimilarities come from the different distributions, but some of them are simply because version version differences. You can check the main differences between Apache 2.2 and 2.4 here.

A map server partitioning scheme

When you have a server machine and plan to run a dedicated Linux server, you should make some partitioning considerations first. For a mapserver you won't have to make a very detailed partitioning scheme, but you may consider to build some partitions for the basic functions of your Linux server. If you have to deal with RAID disks or GPT partitioning then I assume you already know how to structure your server. The following thoughts will be about a normal sized mapserver.