Plaza MapServer

Installation and Configuration
* Prerequisites
o web server with PHP support
o functional MapServer installation with PHP/MapScript
* Basic Installation
o extract archive
o configure web server to access htdocs directory
* MS4W installation is simple!


Main Configuration
* edit include/config.php
* set name of mapscript module
* set name of GD module
* modify default tile settings (if desired)
* set cache directory location

ka-Map ("ka" as in ka-boom!) is an open source project that is aimed at providing a javascript API for developing highly interactive web-mapping interfaces using features available in modern web browsers.

ka-Map has a number of interesting features. It sports the usual array of user interface elements such as:

• interactive, continuous panning without reloading the page
• keyboard navigation options (zooming, panning)
• zooming to pre-set scales
• scalebar, legend and keymap support
• optional layer control on client side (layers are made visible instantly but at reduced performance due to more images, and potentially slower browser interactivity)
• testing. ka-Map needs to be as stable as possible in all modern browsers. Please report success or failure of ka-Map in any browser
• features and bugs. ka-Map needs an active community of developers to help resolve problems and add new features. CVS commit access is restricted but is available to those that are honestly interested in contributing. Even so, anyone can contribute by reporting errors or suggesting new or changed features on the mailing list, or by sending code patches to the mailing list. They'll be considered and added to the CVS version as soon as possible
• Documenters. Documentation is lacking and contributors are needed to help with the developer's API (for maintaining and extending the core), a user's guide to integrating into a mapping application, and a user's guide for end user functionality.

Step by step to install mapserver for windows:

• Download MS4W Base Package from
  http://www.maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml?page=downloads.html. The package includes following components:

• Apache HTTP Server version 2.2.4
• PHP version 5.2.4
• MapServer CGI 5.0
• MapScript 5.0 (CSharp, Java, PHP, Python)
• Includes support for Oracle 10g, and SDE data (if you have associated client/dlls)
• MrSID support built-in
• GDAL/OGR 1.4.2 and Utilities
• MapServer Utilities
• PROJ Utilities
• Shapelib Utilities
• Shp2tile Utility
• Shpdiff Utility
• AVCE00 Utilities
• OGR/PHP Extension 1.0.0
• OWTChart 1.2.0

• Extract into root directory (c:/ms4w or d:/ms4w).
• Execute apache-install.bat to install service of Apache.
• Checking using your browser http://localhost, will display on browser like this:

• Done, so easy right :D

Features

• Advanced cartographic output
• Scale dependent feature drawing and application execution
• Feature labeling including label collision mediation
• Fully customizable, template driven output
• TrueType fonts
• Map element automation (scalebar, reference map, and legend)
• Thematic mapping using logical- or regular expression-based classes

• Support for popular scripting and development environments
• PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, and C#

• Cross-platform support
• Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and more

• A multitude of raster and vector data formats
• TIFF/GeoTIFF, EPPL7, and many others via GDAL
• ESRI shapfiles, PostGIS, ESRI ArcSDE, Oracle Spatial, MySQL and many others via OGR
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web specifications
• WMS (client/server), non-transactional WFS (client/server), WMC, WCS, Filter Encoding, SLD, GML, SOS

• Map projection support
• On-the-fly map projection with 1000s of projections through the Proj.4 library

Web mapping is the process of designing, implementing, generating and delivering maps on the World Wide Web. While web mapping primarily deals with technological issues, web cartography additionally studies theoretic aspects: the use of web maps, the evaluation and optimization of techniques and workflows, the usability of web maps, social aspects, and more. Web GIS is similar to web mapping but with an emphasis on analysis, processing of project specific geodata and exploratory aspects. Often the terms web GIS and web mapping are used synonymously, even if they don't mean exactly the same. In fact, the border between web maps and web GIS is blurry. Web maps are often a presentation media in web GIS and web maps are increasingly gaining analytical capabilities. A special case of web maps are mobile maps, displayed on mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs, GPS and other devices. If the maps on these devices are displayed by a mobile web browser or web user agent, they can be regarded as mobile web maps. If the mobile web maps also display context and location sensitive information, such as points of interest, the term location based services is frequently used.

The use of the web as a dissemination medium for maps can be regarded as a major advancement in cartography and opens many new opportunities, such as realtime maps, cheaper dissemination, more frequent and cheaper updates of data and software, personalized map content, distributed data sources and sharing of geographic information. It also implicates many challenges due to technical restrictions (low display resolution and limited bandwidth, in particular with mobile computing devices, many of which are physically small, and use slow wireless Internet connections), copyright[1] and security issues, reliability issues and technical complexity. While the first web maps were primarily static, due to technical restrictions, today's web maps can be fully interactive and integrate multiple media. This means that both web mapping and web cartography also have to deal with interactivity, usability and multimedia issues.