January 28
Geoserver - a migration story!! – Part 1
Posted by AjayThe why’s and the wherefores!!
Over the past few weeks I have been working on moving our GIS mapping solution into geoserver, a popular open source WMS/AFS server. We have been using a custom built WMS/WFS server that grossly neglected everything that the WMS specs talks about. I mean, I’m talking willfull disobedience of everything the WMS spec was talking about. It was so tightly coupled with our application that when circumstance arose for us to use the same server for another application, we just fell flat on our face. That prompted us (of course with a little monetary support from our customer) to decide to shift to geoserver, which was a major re-architecture of the way we were doing GIS.
Why did we decide to do this?
Some of the reasons we decided to do this
- Our client wanted us to provide a SOA mechanism to provide GIS rendering independent of the client.
- Freedom from constant tinkering and code maintenance to make our product faster and more effective
- Standardization with OGC specification
Some of the challenges we faced
- Tight coupling of web application functionality with WMS/WFS server
- Custom chemical plume layer
- Incompatible jar files
- Programmatic way to populate geoserver with the 200 different layers that we had to display.
- Providing dynamic styling for many of the layers, where the styles were defined by the user
- User layer admin interface coupled to database
Before I delve more into depth I will spend a couple of posts talking about geoserver and caching mechanisms. So in my next post, I will introduce geoserver. Till then ciao!!
References