An Ordinary Geo Web Developer’s Blog

This post is related to presentations and workshops that I gave until now.  All of them is related to Geo issues such as Google Maps API, Google App Engine, ArcGIS Server and its APIs, Arc2Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth (aka Bing Maps).

• Life Cycle of Mashups at DSI – Ankara / Turkey – 29 May 2009 (Turkish) (Presentation)

• Enterprise Mashups in the Clouds – Abu Dhabi / United Arab Emirates – 28 Apr 2009 (Presentation)

• Google Maps and Enterprise Mashup Development (Workshop) – Ankara / Turkey – 21 Dec 2008 (Turkish) (Presentation Part-1 Part-2 Part-3 Part-4)

• Developing Web Based GIS Applications from the Google Maps Approach  – Ankara / Turkey – 21 Nov 2008 (Turkish) (Presentation)

• (ESRI European User Conf.) Developing Hydrology Mashups with ArcGIS Server 9.3 – London / UK – 30 Oct 2008 (Presentation)

• Developing Web Based GIS Applications with “Google Maps” or “Microsoft Virtual Earth – Trabzon / Turkey – 31 Oct 2007  (Turkish) (Presentation) (Paper)

• (ESRI European User Conf.) Web-based Water Information System Using GIS in Turkey – Stockholm / Sweden – 28 Sep 2007  (Presentation)

Google announced the new features for Google App Engine (GAE), but the most important one is the support for Java. Java Developers can use GAE for their applications with small changes. (may be big changes due to datastore restrictions 🙂 )

10.000 developers can have an early access to GAE for Java through this link : http://appengine.google.com/promo/java_runtime

There are also additional feautures as :

• App Engine’s early look at Java™ language support includes a Java runtime, integration with the new Google Web Toolkit 1.6, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse
• The Google Secure Data Connector enables centrally-managed access to on-premise data from Google Apps
• The database import tool makes it easier to move gigabytes of data into App Engine (and export functionality is coming within the month)
• Cron support can execute scheduled tasks like report generation and DB clean-up at regular interval.

This new announcement may lead to change in GIS area, like implementing the GeoServer for GAE or other 3th party GIS tools for GAE

Update 1 : Project name changed from PHPGeoCache to PHPGeoTiles due to a conflict, sorry for change.

Hi Geo Readers,

I am very happy to announce a new Open Source project :   PHPGeoTiles

PHPGeoTiles is a tile proxy for Web Map Services (WMS). It creates tiles from WMS to store them on local disk or Google App Engine‘s “BigTable”.

This project is not the first one, there are better implementations of caching. So there is a question that why did i started this project? There are two answers for this question :

• There is no caching mechanism written in PHP (if there are any, please let me know 🙂 )
• There is no caching mechanism store tiles on Google App Engine

I have been coding for 7 years in PHP, so it is a better environment for me than Java, .NET or python. PHP is also very popular on web due to its simplicity. You can easily find hosting on internet. Also I have been using Google App Engine for 3 months to store my tiles. Google App Engine is a kind of “Cloud Computing” environment to use in your applications.

This version is the first one as numbered 0.1. So that testing phase is very limited and its your responsibility to use it in your projects.

I’m very glad to hear your comments, questions or bug reports about the project 🙂

Project Web Page : PHPGeoTiles

Update 2 : Version 0.2 is available, ArcGIS Server REST API to Google App Engine support is added to new version.