Using OpenLayers to Serve GIS Data
Getting started with MapServer can be a daunting task. There’s a magical configuration file that’s non-intuitive to edit, and a lot of knowledge of things like projections and so on is required to edit the configuration files for anything but the most trivial data. One of the ways I’ve tried to help this has been distributing mapfiles for maps I create so that people can learn from them, but there’s only so much this helps alleviate the pain of learning the mapfile syntax.
This is the reason why I was extremely excited to see QGIS’s support for converting a QGIS project to a map file. Finally, something that could take the headache out of creating mapfiles by hand. Perhaps this could help create the GUI that users needed to create the maps they wanted, and get them onto the web.
Today, I put together a 4 minute video demonstrating exactly this functionality. It shows how to download GIS data, open it in QGIS, style it according to an attribute, and export that view to a map file. It then shows how to load that map file into OpenLayers, so you can view it in the browser.
You can view the video online at OpenLayers: Mapping Your Data (requires Flash), and the wiki page that goes along with it in the OpenLayers Trac: MappingYourData.
Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome.
— Christopher Schmidt, Video Maven