In the following dialog, either leave the default of all checked, or choose to only pre-render certain zoom levels of your data, the choice is yours (probably best to start with the smallest scale – in this case 100,000):

Then click "Build tiles now" and sit back and watch the tiles cook:

Of course, this isn’t practical for a production environment where you would want to batch this operation.  That’s where the second option comes in; clicking on "Save as script" generates a Windows batch file similar to the following that you can script to your heart’s desire:

"C:Program FilesOSGeoMapGuide MaestroMgCookerCommandline.exe" batch
   --mapdefinitions="Library://Samples/Sheboygan/MapsTiled/Sheboygan.MapDefinition"
   --basegroups="Base Layer Group"
   --scaleindex=7
   --mapagent="http://localhost:8008/mapguide/mapagent/mapagent.fcgi"

I have no idea if the MgCookerCommandLine.exe works under Mono, but given that the rest of Maestro seems to work fairly well there I would not be surprised.

Great job Kenneth; this is something we have been sorely missing since MapGuide 1.2, and it’s great to see it as part of Maestro!

-J

With release 0.50 of FDO Toolbox, Jackie has done it again by allowing users to quickly take data from both spatial (FDO) data sources, and non-spatial (OLEDB) data sources, join them together, and write out performance-optimized files. This is a huge boon for folks that need to do this and can’t afford best-of-breed proprietary tools like Safe Software’s FME.

Jackie has really impressed me with the rapid development of this tool as well as his focus on providing value in three distinct areas. First, FDO Toolbox has a great GUI for FDO data transfer and administration. Second, the command line capabilities allow you to set up scheduled translations to keep your SDF files in sync with your corporate data stores. Finally, FDO Toolbox has a minimal profile and can easily be used by install scripts that need to load data, register FDO providers, and other tasks during an automated application installation.

What’s next on the horizon? Jackie’s recent post on an FDO plug-in for SharpMap provides a hint… spatial data inspection coming soon to FDO Toolbox! Now if there was only a way of plugging FDO Toolbox into MapGuide Maestro to transform data and either create packages or load data directly into MapGuide. ;)

-J

I first heard about FDO Toolbox when I got a Google Alert about Jackie Ng’s initial blog post back on July 9th. Since that time, Jackie has posted seven new point releases. That’s seven releases in eleven nineteen days, people!.

Obviously, this insane development pace can’t continue forever, but up until now Jackie has been working furiously with a good number of fixes and new features in each release. Many of the enhancements and modifications have come from external suggestions, so if you try it out and find that it’s missing something or think it could be doing something better, don’t hesitate to make a suggestion.

-J

In September of last year, Kenneth Skovhede changed this with the introduction of Map Studio Open Source. This application, built using C# and supported under .Net and Mono, was immediately more functional that Web Studio.

Fast forward seven months. Having built considerable support and functionality in a short amount of time, Map Studio Open Source was clearly a viable project and was providing benefit to the MapGuide Open Source community. After some discussions between Kenneth and the MapGuide project steering committee, an RFC was created to bring Map Studio Open Source officially into the MapGuide fold. This included a change of name to MapGuide Maestro and a move from Google Code to MapGuide’s OSGeo-hosted wiki, bug tracking, source control, and download services.

If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like, there are some screen shots on the MapGuide wiki… but beware; this project is under rapid development (release early and often) and some of the images are already out of date :)

My advice? Don’t even look at the screenshots, just download Maestro and start using it. Even if you have the full Autodesk MapGuide Studio application, there are some things that Maestro does far better, like retaining inter-resource references when moving things in your repository, or defining raster configuration files for unmanaged image resources. And if you run into problems, make sure to report them so that they can be fixed quickly (and they probably will be).

-J

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.

• View Syntax-highlighted PHP
• Download Zipfile

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

Between OpenLayers (an OSGeo incubating project), TileCache, and FeatureServer, MetaCarta deserves a lot of credit for its innovative contributions to the open source geospatial community. I only have two thoughts:

• This is a real boost for a RESTful GeoWeb
• I wonder how long it will be before MetaCarta gets acquired

Taking into consideration tile caching, RESTful interfaces, and growing consensus on RFC-2 for GeoJSON, I see some real momentum for a geospatial web that actually scales.

Update: I missed crschmidt’s post about this. Sounds like a proud parent :)

-J

This application hasn’t got much attention yet, but it sure deserves some. Initially used as a test platform for Haris’ open source King.Oracle FDO provider, it has quickly evolved into a general purpose FDO data transfer and inspection toolkit.

Haris does a much better job of describing the functionality of this tool than I ever could in his flash movie. I really encourage you to have a look, but set your resolution to at least 1280×1024 for best viewing. As you’re watching, keep in mind that there is a command line utility included which can perform all of the common schema-related (ExportSchema, CreateDatastore, ApplySchema, CopyData) tasks. For usage you can just navigate to the isntallation folder and type f2fcmd from the Windows command line.

The demo shows SHP, SDF, and Oracle as datastores, but you can easily add any FDO provider to the application. These include things like MySQL, ArcSDE 9.1, and (read-only) any OGR-supported data format. The utility of this application is simply outstanding.

If you paid attention to the movie (and know where I work) you’ll be able to figure out my personal interest in this tool. It has allowed the City to set up a low cost one-click data synchronization between a remote field application and a corporate database. All this required was the judicial use of the “Filter” option, some saved XML transfer tasks, and pre-defined schemas. One cool feature (that we didn’t use) is that you can apply geometry filters, allowing you to transfer a specific area of interest.

fdo2fdo is currently only available in a windows binary download (with Oracle instant client bundled, which is why it’s so big), but Haris has assured me that after he cleans up the code he will be submitting at least the command line and API code to the FDO SVN repository under an appropriate OSI-approved license. Haris is new to the open source world, but he’s catching on really fast.

I believe that the API and command line tool were coded in standard C++, so I’m hoping that they can be ported to Linux shortly after he uploads them. I’m also hoping that the GUI portion of the application will be uploaded. It’s apparently written in MFC, so there isn’t an easy translation to Linux. However, it could act as a model to help someone else build a Linux-based GUI.

-J

By now most of you know that Google has released version 4 of Google Earth. This version comes with a new revision of the KML format, with some really cool goodies. If you haven’t already, make sure you download the latest version before trying out any of the live demos in this post.

I’ve just finished hacking together a PHP script that distributes WMS services as nested Region-based KML layers, what Google is calling SuperOverlays.

You can download the WMS2KML script as a zipfile, or view the source online. And no comments on the sloppy style… I’m tired :)

Looking for some good WMS sites to try this out with, I picking up on Matt Perry’s post about his favourite WMS servers a few months ago and used some of these for my examples. The following images show what each of the WMS reflectors gives for an area off the east coast of Florida near Jacksonville.

Base

USGS DOQ

Live Example – Source Code

USGS DRG

Live Example – Source Code

NEXRAD Base Reflectivity

Live Example – Source Code

Well, that’s it… I’m off to work. Let me know what you think, and please pass along links to any services you put in place!

The recent 1.0.0 release of MapGuide comes with a great feature that allows you to import and export portions of this XML data store, including any referenced spatial data, into something called a “package”. A package is just a zipfile with an .mgp extension, which contains XML data and any referenced files.

The only problem with this feature is that it could only be accessed via the web-based site administrator. I wanted to use this ability to automate data transfers from my intranet site to my externally hosted internet site, and really didn’t want to be staying up until midnight each night. Fortunately, MapGuide Open Source is, well, open source. The site administration interface is written in PHP, and uses the same well-documented web API as the web maps.

Armed with a hammer (what else would you use to drive screws?) I attacked the site administration import/export code, and came up with a couple PHP utilities for importing and exporting packages from the command line using the php CLI.

cli_loadpackage.php
Usage: php cli_loadpackage.php AdministratorPassword PackageName.mgp

cli_makepackage.php {watch line wrap}
Usage: php cli_makepackage.php AdministratorPassword PackageName.mgp Library://FolderPath "Package Description"

You can download mgpackageutils.zip from my site, but only with the understanding that I accept no responsibility for your use of these tools. Even if you turn into a chicken. This archive contains the PHP utilities, a readme file, a copy of the LGPL license, and a couple DOS batchfiles for testing:

http://www.jasonbirch.com/files/mgpackageutils.zip

Next job? Create a utility to unzip the .mgp file, rsync the results to the external site, and zip it back up before importing on the other side. I’ll just file that at the bottom of my 10-page TODO list…

Footnotes:

1. Although the data itself could potentially be stored as a byte stream in the XML file, spatial data is typically stored within the Library repository on the server.

2. At some point I hope to be able to provide some tools to define external data sources, based on a conversation on the MapGuide Users List)

.