Chris' GISmo's » GIS News

ERDAS Apollo vs ESRI ArcGIS Server

Chris Tweedie — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Lets face it, whatever benchmark results a vendor (*gasp*) publishes always draws a certain amount of suspicion. Luckily however, T-Ma py (Czech Republic) have just made available a detailed independant 20 page report on ERDAS Apollo vs ESRI ArcGIS Server.

T-Mapy have a long history with ESRI and now also ERDAS technology so they offer great perspective and expertise on both products. Michal Šeliga has done a wonderful job analysing performance and other metrics for serving a very large (290gb) 10cm aerial photo via WMS. Word of the day goes to “eyemetricaly worse” on page 13

Raster Image Serving Benchmarks

Chris Tweedie — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:41:57 +0000

I am pleased to announce my own performance metrics continuuing on from the FOSS4G 2009 WMS Raster tests. So, whats new?

Tests extended from just TIF and ECW to TIF, ECW, JP2, MrSID, TIF Tiled, TIF Internal Pyramid, TIF External Pyramid
Platform changed from RHEL to Windows Server 2008 x64
Increased the threads from 1,10,20,40 to 1,10,20,40,80,150.
Hardware increased from a 4 core to 8 core server
Analysed throughput not only by input format, but by output WMS Format as well. 8bit PNG vs 24 bit PNG vs JPEG vs GIF
Added ERDAS Apollo to the mix along with Mapserver and Geoserver (Deegree and Mapguide was with very limited success … I’ll add these later)

I will endeavour to update the page with new results as there is no question further tuning could be applied. I am not going to comment specifically on the results, as I want to leave the interpretation up to you.

Look out for more performance tests in the coming days..

Enjoy!

CarbonArc revisited

Chris Tweedie — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:57:21 +0000

Jeff Harrison’s mass email caught my eye today with the free trial of CarbonArc. I had the pleasure of taking an early release of CarbonArc for a spin last year and while it was a good start there were a few key things missing from my point of view. Having pushed and prodded Mapinfo 9.5 support for use with our SDI, why not run the new CarbonArc 1.6 through its paces …

From the press release,

CarbonArc PRO 1.6 eliminates barriers to SDI usability through advanced SOA-based discovery, analysis, exploitation, transaction management and security tools for OGC SDI – directly from the ESRI ArcGIS desktop.

Instead of just regurgitating the release, the key question that always gets asked is … doesn’t ESRI ArcGIS already do all this?

Its a tricky question to answer because while on paper i could say, “Yes it does!”, in reality there are just so many annoying quirks and missing features, it quickly becomes a nightmare integrating SDI features into your normal ArcGIS workflow (which is what this is all about, right?). So with fingers crossed, lets dive right in and see what i can find in 5 minutes flat …

The Good

Well laid out and robust tool set which delivers fully functional WMS/WFS/WFST/WCS capabilities … with no mucking about required!. The thing just works.
Very easy export to Shapefile tool
Full featured filter encoding support … no black magic, user has full control
Full access to the query string for all service types
Caching of features / images when saving to project files

The Bad

GML Integration will always be difficult given its a completely new ArcGIS feature source, but its still not up to the average users expectations I dont think. There is no attribute table, the features are independant of pretty much all other ArcGIS functionality so you are really left with GAIA functionality squished into an ArcGIS window.
Web services request headers are devoid of any accept-encoding headers. I’m still pondering the choice of Expect: 100 requests … but i’m sure there’s a good reason in the depths of HTTP …
The exclusive tool for CubeWerx “Identity Management Service” seems a bit strange as i’m not aware of any services that use this technology? Shoot me a link if i missed something!
Lack of support for any WMS LegendGraphics. Users can choose from multiple Styles, but theres no way to actually view legend information which is a bit disappointing
In the full minute spent trying, i wasnt able to get the WFST support working … i could get as far as the schema but as soon as i’d try to insert a feature the thing would just bail out.

I’m beginning to think the best suggestion would be to somehow merge CarbonArc WFS functionality with an automated export to shape on each filter response. This would allow excellent SDI WFS support, while still giving full ESRI ArcGIS functionality to users without having to reinvent the wheel (for things like the edit system). With the WMS/WCS support pretty solid, i think getting the balance of WFS right could mean the difference between a very promising product and one I would recommend to everyone using our platform.

Thoughts?

WFS-T adventures with Mapinfo 9.5

Chris Tweedie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:17:57 +0000

So i’ve been a bit late taking a look at the new Mapinfo Professional v9.5. With the consistent dissapointment towards the consumption of OGC standards in commercial apps I wasn’t holding my breath … but wait a sec, it did work and it worked damn well. I mean, it worked flawlessly; updates, inserts, deletes, lock support and it also comes complete with a semi-intelligent conflict manager.

A few more suggestions to improve things further (for anyone listening~) …

Add HTTP compression handling. Huge performance gains with the transfer of features and its really a no brainer to enable in any http library.
I am by no means a “Mapinfo Master” ™, but it would be great to enable an automated WFS Table refresh especially if you are retrieving features based on CURRENT_MAPPER. I guess the CTRL+F5 shortcut makes it easy-ish … but i certainly found myself wondering whether i had retrieved the features or not and ended up just sending unnecessary requests.
If a transaction is successful, give me some kind of alert. Alerting only when it fails does not instill much confidence whether my long edit session went through or not (even after refreshing)
It would be fantastic to add helpful warning messages when performance drops. I’d imagine most users would skim over the maxfeatures and column / row filters and just add the layer.

If the first request takes 5 minutes and Mapinfo tells me i just retrieved 4000 poly features totalling 10mb and it kindly directed me to the WFS how-to, i’d be more inclined to see what the filtering options were all about

So there’s no WFS1.1 support … but i’m still trying to get my head around handling the axis order issue and are more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie … at least for the moment. I only had time to test against our Geoserver installs, but it certainly seems tested against many other apps including Cadcorp, Ionic & Mapinfo. Geoserver specific here, but the advanced security in 1.6.x works very well with the bundled support for basic authentication.

Finally…

LBS has arrived

Chris Tweedie — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:24:13 +0000

Finally a consumer personal navigational device with internet connectivity, meet Dash Express. See also Engadget review.

The opportunities this opens up to both the Geo community and also Joe Public is quite huge. Enter GeoRSS. Your time to shine has arrived

Many websites have geo-relevant content – including, but not limited to, Google Maps, Yelp, Craigslist, Trulia, Gruvr, and many more. Just check the source of the feed to see if there is a latitude/longitude provided for each item in the feed, and if so, the odds are good that it will work as a MyFeed on MyDash.

Hopefully this will continue across the PND market. *fingers crossed* The only downer (apart from the price) ?

It will not work in Canada, Mexico, Europe or any location outside the United States

ERMapper cashes in..

Chris Tweedie — Mon, 21 May 2007 11:44:31 +0000

Wow, big news.

Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging Acquires ER Mapper

I thought it was initially a joke when Jeff posted it a second ago. No release on ERMapper site, nothing on DirectionsMag … but i managed to find the hot-off-the-press feed above.

The merger makes sense but i’d hate to see the fella’s move off shore. We may be a little off the beaten track here in Perth but we certainly seem to have the brains.

All the best to the ERMapper crew. Hopefully the transition can be a smooth one (so i can still send those annoying feature requests)

Openlayers 2.0 released

Chris Tweedie — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 06:54:59 +0000

It doesn’t seem as though the usual suspects picked up on this, but Openlayers is now officially at v2.0

The OpenLayers development team is proud to announce the release of
OpenLayers 2.0.

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can
display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers is
completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License.

This new release of OpenLayers supports a number of new layer types,
including support for Virtual Earth, Google, and more, alongside WMS,
WFS, KaMap, and GeoRSS.

The main development crew including Chris Schmidt certainly brings new meaning to “release early, release often”. Check out the examples for some ideas of what this js library is capable of.

If you’re wanting a client you can set up in 10 seconds, requires little configuration, has no serverside component and consumes a variety of data services .. this is for you! Watch the next release for some funky new canvas code too

Google maps finally gets aus data

Chris Tweedie — Fri, 19 May 2006 01:03:34 +0000

Seems as though Google Maps has finally integrated the PSMA dataset. Just had a quick look and the data seems to be fairly recent.

I feel sorry for the zoomin guys as no doubt their target audience has all but dissappeared over night (until of course businesses read googles licencing arrangements ).

Has anyone been able to get routing working? Seems as though its not accepting any kind of local address i throw at it.

Overall i’m not too impressed, but maybe thats because i have access to this sort of data all the time. It certainly will be interesting to see what sort of local “mashups” (god i hate that word) are created.

via geblog

GeaBios – Tiny WMS/WFS Client

Chris Tweedie — Sat, 06 May 2006 14:58:11 +0000

Wow, i just keep finding neater and neater stuff!

After reading up on some new AJAX frameworks, i stumbled upon a press release from the Dojo Toolkit boys saying they were teaming up with OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and soon DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI.

Flicking through the documentation, this framework definately warranted more attention (i can’t say i’ve heard much buzz on laszlo). I had been toying with the idea of making a functional, usable web based gis for a while now but just as i started dipping my toe in the water – someone already beat me to it!

GeaBios stands for Geo Enabled And Better Internet Oriented Services and from what i can gather, is a group of academics from Slovenia. Although usability could definately be improved, the core wms/wfs functionality is fantastic and integration with other XML sensor feeds is done really well.

The fact that no actionscript coding are needed for the whole app and i can choose which interface (flash/dhtml) has got me sold! Check it out

New WMS Flash client

Chris Tweedie — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:49:25 +0000

Edwin Wisse from the Netherlands has just released a new WMS client called Beeldblad (dutch for “image sheet”) on the WMS-dev mailing list.

Looks like a great starting point for the general user wanting to get their WMS “usable” and deployed very quickly.

Detailed installation instructions are included for the 130k SWF including a separate PHP proxy to bypass the cross domain restrictions. Some very quick tests had this sucker working a treat … great work guys.