Everything Java Apache Geospatial Open Source. Hello Shinning Stars!!! Vincent Massol, Raphael Luta, Santiago Gala, Carsten Z.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

A MapServer portlet requires the following elements:
  • MapServer Software
  • Geographic Data
  • MapServer Configuration
  • Apache Portlet Bridge for MapServer
  • Jetspeed Configuration
MapServer Software
MapServer is a C program therfore you must obtain the proper version for your target operating system. Linux and Unix users will find that downloading the source and compiling it is the simplest alternative. Listed here are links to MapServer source and its required dependencies. Build each of these packages using the ./configure, make, and sudo make install commands. Building MapServer will tell you which dependencies are missing on your system.

MapServer-4.6.1 source code
GD-2.0.33 source code
Freetype-2.1.10 source code
Jpeg-6b source code
Png-1.2.8 source code

Windows users can use the ms4w package provided by maptools.org.

Mac OS users will find help here.

Geographic Data
The MapServer demo includes some sample geographic data.

MapServer Configuration
MapServer is configured using a MapFile. The demo configuration file is itasca.map.

Apache Portal Bridge for MapServer
A contribution to the Apache Portal Bridges project yeilded a component capable of executing the MapServer program. This bridge uses the portlet initalization parameters to determine the inital map. MapScript for Java is on the roadmap.

Jetspeed Configuration
A simple modification to any existing portlet.xml is enough to deploy a new MapServer map. See the attachment in the Jira issue.

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