Archive for November, 2007
What’s cool about ‘My Location’?
Posted by Jason Birch in Google on November 28, 2007
Certainly not the fact that Google is estimating location from cell strength; that’s pretty low-tech and has been done in 911 call centres for quite some time.
What I think is cool is that they are using the 15% of Mobile Maps users who do have GPS to populate their database of cell tower locations.
Once more cell phones support wi-fi (will this EVER happen in North America?) they’ll be able to take advantage of the same infrastructure to build their wi-fi location database.
-J
MapGuide Open Source 2.0 beta1: Chock full o’ goodness
Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, Open Source on November 22, 2007
Get ‘em while they’re hot, the MapGuide Open Source 2.0 beta installers are ready for your consumption.
Grab the source code or installers, and then head over to the samples page to find some Fusion layout examples to play with. The Milestone, Release, and Release Notes pages provide more information for the details-inclined.
This release absolutely has enough new features to justify a major version jump. Although the list of new features and bug fixes in this release is immense, a few of the biggies (in my mind) are:
- Fusion Support (by DM Solutions Group)
- Introduction of AGG rendering (optional)
- Stability Improvements
- JSON output format from CGI calls for easier AJAX
The initial Fusion technology preview was really cool looking, but this beta shows off what is possible to an even larger extent. Have a look at the following screen shots!
If that doesn’t give you a reasonable idea of the flexibility and capabilities of MapGuide Open Source when coupled with Fusion, I don’t know what will :)
The AGG renderer, while somewhat less flashy, is nonetheless a major improvement in MapGuide’s ability to deliver nice looking maps to the user. Have a look at the GD version of a zoomed-in area of my cemetery map:
And compare it to the AGG version of the same:
Pay special attention to the accurate rendering of line widths, and the nice smooth anti-aliasing.
Although stability has been addressed throughout the code base, another feature that I have been waiting for is losing FastCGI support in favour of a native Apache module and ISAPI extension. FastCGI caused intermittent service interruptions, and these new modules appear to have addressed this problem. My testing to this point has shown considerably higher stability.
And finally, JSON output from the MapAgent will make application developers’ lives a lot easier. Rather than getting back XML from the MapAgent, you can request JSON so you don’t have to deal with XML parsing any more.
Of course, with the amount of changes that went into this release under the hood, it’s likely that there will be some issues. Please make sure that if you run into a bug you report it.
-J
Listing MapGuide Data File Locations
Posted by Jason Birch in Code, MapGuide, Open Source, Utilities on November 17, 2007
Over on the MapGuide Users mailing list, Zac said: "it would be nice to add a text file listing the unmanaged resources"
Happy to oblige! :)
OK, not quite, but I’ve created a simple command-line PHP script that talks to the MapGuide repository and outputs a CSV containing the ResourceID and File Path for all data sources that I’ve recognised as file-based. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to filter this to only show unmanaged data sources.
Sample output:
C:\MgTest\listpaths>php cli_listfiles.php admin
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages2.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages3.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_sid”
“Library://Test/Data/ABC123.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_ecw\”
“Library://Test/Data/MyImages4.FeatureSource”,”C:\TestData\img_sid\”
“Library://ImageTest/Data/ImageTest.FeatureSource”,”C:\ImageTest”
“Library://ImageTest/Data/Tiled.FeatureSource”,”C:\ImageTest\”
“Library://SdfTest/Data/bc_border.FeatureSource”,”%MG_DATA_FILE_PATH%”
I think this shows how easy it is to throw around the XML that MapGuide uses in its repositories.
-J
OSGeo BC Local Chapter First Meeting
Posted by Jason Birch in Advocacy, OSGeo on November 16, 2007
Today, about 24 people gathered in two offices for a videoconference to kick off the Open Source Geospatial Foundation BC Local Chapter (In-Waiting.. we still have to apply for official recognition by OSGeo)
I was really impressed by the number of people who showed up to help us get started, and by the level of energy. We had attendees from all three levels of government, private industry, and geospatial consultants. The official minutes, goals, and objectives will be posted shortly, but my impression is that we are going to be working on regional advocacy and acting as a local support group for sharing ideas and solutions around open source software and data, and open standards.
Bright shiny future, etc, etc… Come join us :)
-J
OpenSocial: scope of disruption
Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Loose Integration on November 2, 2007
If you’re only looking at adoption by the players like MySpace, I think you’re missing the big picture.
Sure, buy-in by these sites is going to push adoption of the APIs, but for me the real value is that this extends social capabilities beyond the sphere of these "container" sites to the entire web. If you read the Google OpenSocial FAQs, nowhere do they say that its goal is to enhance sharing between portals. In fact, they explicitly say:
This is an effort which we hope will benefit the entire web community. [...] In the future, we are planning to open-source the components that are required to run OpenSocial on your own website.
The code hasn’t been released yet, but the docs make it clear that this vision has merit. OpenSocial uses gData, AtomPub, and a whole lot of REST goodness to allow any website to implement interactive social capabilities.
I see this taking off quickly in blogging (FriendBlogRoll,etc), but I also see huge potential for things like distributed social mapping. Take a look at what Google has done with its Put Yourself on the Map capabilities. That’s pretty cool on an individual mapping level, but imagine extending that out to community maps, implemented similar to the concept of “Groups” on Facebook. Encapsulate some GeoRSS in gData (via Sean) and how hard would it be to build an OpenSocial system where "friends" can all interact with the same map through their interface of choice? OpenSocial is already geo-aware to some extent; the People data includes a GeoRSS GML Point element to locate individuals!
OpenSocial has incredible value for traditional web sites as well. I’ve been considering several different applications for my hobby website (I built this Drink Recipes website in college, and it’s stuck with me since) such as "tell a friend", "friends favourite drinks", etc, etc. All of these could be built as plug-ins for OpenSocial-enabled sites (and of course as an additional plug-in for Facebook), but they can also be exposed on the main website, turning the whole web into one big social network.
One area that I don’t really understand is how OpenSocial deals with distributed authentication. It looks like you can either authenticate locally (through user/pass) or through Google Accounts using AuthSub. I don’t know a lot about this area, but I really think that this may need to be extended to authentication methods like OpenID.
-J
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