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PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

blog.cleverelephant.ca

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#13

PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?

Mapbox is the probably the best GL based mapping client but it is no longer free on the latest version. Although, its not designed to work with PostGIS explicitly you definitely can. (i.e. querying mvts, map tiles, through PostGIS)

Leaflet as others have said is another good option, but is really made for old slipply map tiles.

Most of the ESRI based web clients I think look and feel terrible IMO. Rendering just looks off. What features are you looking for in a mapping client?

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#14

PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?

If you are doing analysis and exploration, or creating offline reports, QGIS is worth learning. It can connect to and query a PostGIS backend directly, and doesn't need to do any sort of intermediate translation and storage that I've seen other packages require. It's scriptable, and extremely flexible -- I've used it to create reports and artifacts to share externally. Overall a solid example of spectacular open source software.

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#15

PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?

If you are doing analysis and exploration, or creating offline reports, QGIS is worth learning. It can connect to and query a PostGIS backend directly, and doesn't need to do any sort of intermediate translation and storage that I've seen other packages require. It's scriptable, and extremely flexible -- I've used it to create reports and artifacts to share externally. Overall a solid example of spectacular open sour…

While QGIS is ok, for many applications including analysis and making reports. It is not particularly suited if you want to embed a map view in another application, or to build a full custom front end to render map views.

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#16
I migrated my LAMP stack app to postgres+postgis in 2005, and met with Refractions folks in Victoria for advice, I have nothing but glowing reviews and its only gotten better since.

Now I need something like that but in N dimensions...

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#17

PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?

PostGIS is now basically the "industry standard", so most third party tools work with it, even Esri! Here's some open source parts:

Desktop: https://qgis.org

Middleware: https://mapserver.org, https://geoserver.org, https://mapnik.org, https://github.com/crunchydata/pg_tileserv, https://github.com/crunchydata/pg_featureserv

Web UI: https://openlayers.org, https://leaflet.org, https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gljs

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#18

PostGIS is popular and fine, but is there a front end framework available designed to work with it, so that one can fully avoid the proprietary ESRI stack?

I recently built a prototype with GeoDjango & it seems productive.

Queries & plots are relatively straightforward. Creating custom forms to edit map data is harder to figure out. The tutorials I found focus on the Django admin, but don’t explain how to create user-facing forms for site visitors.

Anyone know of good GeoDjango tutorials (or well documented examples) for forms?

- update the location of a point with drag and drop

- add waypoints to a line

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#19
I love PostGIS. I have used it in many projects.

PostGIS raster is really interesting to me but the general sentiment is that it's a bit slow and only use it if you need to. It just seems so powerful to combine raster and vector with SQL. What would the alternative be for raster query vertical and horizontal combined with vector? GRASSGIS Timeseries tools look interesting but I've not tried those. Any other ideas?

Re: PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

#20

I love PostGIS. I have used it in many projects. PostGIS raster is really interesting to me but the general sentiment is that it's a bit slow and only use it if you need to. It just seems so powerful to combine raster and vector with SQL. What would the alternative be for raster query vertical and horizontal combined with vector? GRASSGIS Timeseries tools look interesting but I've not tried those. Any other ideas?

I remain pretty leery of raster in the database, for the reasons you list, but the power of GDAL to reach out over networks for raster access makes me a little more excited about some raster/vector use cases. It's not a panacea, but it's something.

https://blog.crunchydata.com/postgis-raster-and-crunchy-brid...

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