[GIS] Stack – Mapnik, TileMill, OpenLayers, GeoExt

geoextmapnikopenlayers-2tilemillweb-mapping

Would this work as a stack for serving web maps with the basic GIS viewer functionality (pan, zoom, layer switching, info popups)?

Apache Web Server
Mapnik to serve the geo-data (TileMill to Style the Mapnik data)
OpenLayers to display in browser
GeoExt or JQuery for added functionality

Do I have that right? Am I missing anything?
I've read through a bunch of the threads and other web map info, still not sure exactly where/how Mapnik fits in. It can replace GeoServer/MapServer in a stack?

And TileMill, not sure how the styled map gets added to the server.

Thoughts and advice very much appreciated!

Best Answer

That will work as Mapnik can be configured as a WMS (http://code.google.com/p/mapnik-utils/wiki/WmsInstallGuide) but I think you are supposed to just build out all the tiles in the world and serve them directly to openlayers (assuming that you have enough disk space). See http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/tilecache.html for an example.

Related Solutions

[GIS] Mapnik generate_tiles.py error using .xml from TileMill

You obviously have to download fonts from the github repo and place them in the fonts subdirectory near osm.xml. If they are not found, put them somewhere mapnik could find them. The original OSMBright style was obviously made to be used from the style directory.

OSMBright repository doesn't have any references to "Free Sans", you must have mistyped.

Also, I'd recommend more intelligent way of producing tiles: polytiles.py.

[GIS] How to get started webmapping with xyz-tiles and Geoserver

If you create xyz tiles with mbutil, you don't need GeoServer. Mapping libraries like OpenLayers and Leaflet can read the image tiles directly from the tile folder mbutil creates.

For example, you create tiles in a folder called 'mytiles' and you place that folder in the root directory of your web server. The URL you pass to your mapping library to create the tile layer would be:

http://your.server.com/mytiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

For OpenLayers, I believe the code to initialize a tile layer is:

new ol.layer.Tile({
  source: new ol.source.XYZ({
    url: http://your.server.com/mytiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png'
  })

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] Mapnik generate_tiles.py error using .xml from TileMill

[GIS] How to get started webmapping with xyz-tiles and Geoserver

Related Question