lizard-map is a software that provides basic map interaction for Django applications that use a lizard-ui user interface. We designed it at Nelen & Schuurmans for our geographical information websites (with water management information).

It provides:

 * Openlayers (map javascript libary) map display and server-side map generation (mapnik's WMS functionality).
 * A "workspace" interaction model: drag mappable items into a workspace and they'll get displayed. The workspace is stored in the Django database.
 * A "collage" attached to every workspace for storing selected info on map items (like graphs).
 * An extention mechanism to plug more or less arbitrary map sources into the workspace so that they can be displayed, searched, etc.

Core concept: workspaces

A workspace item is something that can be displayed on a map. A workspace is a collection of workspace items that is actually displayed.

Every session gets its own workspace. (There is a possiblity of adding extra workspaces, but that isn't used yet in one of our sites, so it isn't fully thought-out yet).

A workspace item needs to know how to display itself, how to search for items when you click on the map and more. To get that to work for arbitrary map sources, you need to configure an adapter. The adapter has a layer() method for returning a mapnik layer, a search() method for searching and so on.

 * You register an adapter as a so-called "setuptools entrypoint" under a specfic name.
 * When you add a workspace item, you pass in the adapter name and an optional snippet of json to configure the adapter.

The workspace item keeps track of this adapter and its configuragion and uses it to generate maps, for searching, etc.

Collages

A workspace item often results in multiple areas or points. If you click on such a point, you normally get a popup with extra information. If you want to compare a couple of those information "snippets", you can place them in your workspace's collage.

Clicking the collage gives a popup with all the collected information popups in that single popup.

Interaction

Included is quite some javascript for workspace interaction. Potential workspace items can be drag/dropped into a workspace to add them. Workspace items can be reordered. You can drag them to the trash.

Development installation

The first time, you'll have to run the "bootstrap" script to set up setuptools and buildout:

$> python bootstrap.py

And then run buildout to set everything up:

$> bin/buildout

(On windows it is called bin\buildout.exe).

You'll have to re-run buildout when you or someone else made a change in setup.py or buildout.cfg.

The current package is installed as a "development package", so changes in .py files are automatically available (just like with python setup.py develop).

If you want to use trunk checkouts of other packages (instead of released versions), add them as an "svn external" in the local_checkouts/ directory and add them to the develop = list in buildout.cfg.

Tests can always be run with bin/test or bin\test.exe.

External dependencies

The dependencies for a full website that uses lizard-map are best expressed as ubuntu/debian package dependencies: build-essential, python2.6-dev, apache2, libjpeg-dev, python-imaging, python-matplotlib, python-mapnik, python-scipy, libapache2-mod-wsgi, python-gdal, spatialite-bin, python-pysqlite2, python-pyproj.


Product's homepage

Requirements:

· Python

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Removed object-actions block with the non-existing 'help-workspace' url that broke the interface.