foss4g

The presentations for FOSS4G are over, and just a few workshops and the code sprint are left in the official conference.  This year I ran a workshop on GeoDjango with Chris Schmidt, and gave a presentation on the work I did recently with walkscore.com. 

The workshop had a few technical glitches (no power, internet, or projector for the first bit), and as Chris mentioned, we probably should have practiced together in a fully offline mode beforehand.  On that note, thanks a lot to Chris for agreeing to help out as a replacement at the last minute -- it would have been quite a struggle without him there.  Still, we got through most of the material, and participants ended up with working admin editing for points and polygons, and some public facing pages that showed a good hint of GeoDjango's possibilities.  I learned quite a lot from this workshop, and am looking forward to repeating it in the future.  After fixing up a few  bugs in docs and vmware image, I'll post the tutorial and links to the image somewhere online.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shape Escape

Well it's been a while, so just a quick note: Since the last post, I started working full time for Google. And with that out of the way, here's a post on how and why I made shpescape.com , which lets you upload shapefiles to Google Fusion Tables . Why shpescape? Google Fusion tables makes it easy to import and visualize data from spreadsheets and KML, and while it has increasingly robust spatial support it does not currently let you upload shapefiles directly. And since shapefiles are still incredibly common in the wild, I thought I'd make a quick tool to let people upload shapefiles to Fusion Tables. Which platform? I thought I'd try Google App Engine to avoid any hosting costs (given this will likely not be an extremely popular website), but while there's a decent shapefile reader or two for python, there's not a lot of support for things like reprojecting and other geometry manipulation without additional c++ libraries that App Engine won't
Read more

Walk On

A few months ago, Walkscore.com launched their new API , aimed a Real Estate sites, academic and other largescale studies, and anyone else who might want programmatic access to the walkability of a set of locations. Recently, a number of large sites ( zillow.com , Estately.com , BaseEstate.com , and ColoProperty.com amongst many others) have started to incorporate walkscore in their listings, which has led to the happy situation of ensuring the site can handle the popularity. When the good folks at Walkscore first contacted me about designing the API, we talked about the likelyhood we'd be serving many, many millions of daily requests shortly after launch. This quickly led into discussions about what framework we wanted to build it on, and how much IT we were interested in taking on. Eventually, we decided to use Google's AppEngine . Given the current, and quickly growing, popularity of the API, I think this ended up being a great choice - no worries about having to even
Read more

Featureserver on AppEngine

AppEngine is awesome. The more we use it, the more we like it. Recently, someone contacted us who needed a site up, in a hurry, to serve up some points on a google map. The catch was there were about 50k points (so it seemed server side clustering might be nice). Also they wanted to be able to serve up at _least_ tens of millions of requests a day. And maybe quite a lot more. Given the scaling requirements, it seemed like AppEngine might be a nice fit, since then we wouldn't have to worry so much about tons of caching, or ensuring clients made similar bounding box requests, and so forth. And as for the posting/getting of points to/from appengine, we decided to go for using FeatureServer as a base. If you're not familiar with featureserver, a quick overview: It makes it easy to (amongst other things) post/update your features to some datastore, and pull them out with bounding box and/or attribute queries in a variety of vector formats (kml, json, wfs, etc). Al
Read more