Hi. I’m announcing a Rails Engine for presenting maps based on your
own data, either rendered by Mapserver, or pulled directly out of
geometric database tables stored by PostGIS. There’s a demo here:
http://ivygis.mgxkernel.com:3000/canada
which shows a tiled, draggable version of a Mapserver demo map, with
mouse-sensitive park polygons and railroads (SVG in Firefox 1.5+, VML
in IE). The data for the mouse-sensitive objects is being pulled live
out of PostGIS, and processed for display as SVG or VML, whichever the
browser supports.
More on the package can be found here:
including downloads and instructions. There are two ways to get the
code right now. One is a tar file containing the engine and nothing
but the engine; that’s here:
http://ivygis.justec.co.in/downloads.html
That requires you to have Postgresql, PostGIS, Mapserver, Ruby
Mapscript, and all their dependencies installed — which can,
regrettably be a real pain in the neck. So, the quickest way to try
it out might be to use a FOSS GIS suite package which rolls up the
engine, the demo apps, Ruby Mapscript, and Rails 1.1.2 into an
all-in-one “instant IvyGIS” package — instructions for installing
that are here:
http://ivygis.justec.co.in/documentation.html
(FWIW, this package includes the ruby-postgres gem, but the code has
been tried at least briefly with the postgres and postgres-pr gems as
well, with no obvious problems).
Development of this code has been supported by Japan Spatial
Information Technology, Inc., and I’ve got their permission to release
it on the same terms as PostGIS — that is, GPLed. (We may be
switching to a less restrictive license later, as management permits,
but it’s GPLed for now). We hope you have fun with it.
Robert Thau
[email protected]