I've developed many GIS Applications using ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 and 10.0 for ASP.NET.
I'm wondering if I can do a GIS application using my shapefiles and pure PHP scripting. I've Googled for that purpose, found many MapServer solutions, but they were a little bit complicated.
My question is: can I have a little Web application to mange the shapefiles, create tiles for them, deal with aerial images, and then display map layers using OpenLayers for example?
I need a lite solution (No PHP extensions installing required – NO special set up…etc.).
Best Answer
Use your GDAL's Fusion Table driver to load your shapefiles into Google Fusion Tables. The GFT developer docs are pretty self explanatory.
You can then use standard php code (even in your shared hosting environment) to write your webapp. If you want more functionality, you are going to have to move to something where you have more control of your environment. I would start with the free Amazon EC2 micro-instances.