Green Framing All The Things!

This will appear to be a strange subject to post about considering my other content, but I recently went through a positive thinking reset, and I was surprised and amazed by some of the results, so I thought I would share.

Serving-up ArcGIS Map Tiles From Amazon S3

Its been a long time since my last blog article, having changed jobs late last year and being in "the zone" getting up to speed with how my new company operates, and responding to new challenges that my new role brings.  However I recently had a chance to utilise Amazon Web Services' S3 service for publishing map tile caches, and since I wasn't able to find a great depth of information on the subject I figured I would post about it.

Serving-up GeoJSON while having a REST on the GeoCouch

Wow, it's been a while.  Between having my tonsils removed (which is not pleasant as an adult), to finishing up with my employer of 11 years and starting a new job, things have been rather hectic over the last few months, but I have found time to put together my third post on my GeoJSON adventure that I have been dabbling with for the last 6 months or so.


I set out on this GeoJSON journey to investigate the definition as a spatial format specification, and to see what I could get for free in terms of interoperability, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of applications that support the format.


In my first post on Tile5 rendering GeoJSON I was interested mainly on the map rendering side of things and what I needed to do to massage my data into GeoJSON to take advantage of that rendering.


In my second post on Leaflet rendering GeoJSON passed from ExpressJS/NodeJS I delved more into the interoperability of GeoJSON between Leaflet on the client, and the javascript application server serving data from PostGIS, which was able to return query results in GeoJSON format.


In this third post I have taken the next step, storing my GeoJSON data in a NoSql database - CouchDB, and exposing it directly from the database to the client.

Nought to PostGIS in 6.3 seconds…almost

In a recent post I decided to investigate some technologies that were new to me, such as leaflet, node.js and express, but in addition to these I had never interacted with PostgreSQL/PostGIS before either, so setting up PostGIS was part of my learning exercise.  Being a noob when it came to PostgreSQL and PostGIS, and fairly inexperienced in linux generally, I was able to find the information I needed to get going, but I thought I would pool it together in one location so others can see what I had to do to get my spatial database and queries working in PostGIS, for any other new comers to PostGIS to learn from as well.

Node.js + Express + Leaflet + PostGIS = Awesome Maps

Recently I blogged about using GeoJSON to create a very lean application for serving dynamic maps.  To date, all of my posts have related in some way to Microsoft technologies because that is my environment, day-in, day-out, but I thought it would be interesting to create a similar solution to the last blog post using technologies I haven't used before - why? - because it's good to learn something new, and these libraries are really cool!

Simple Maps Using GeoJSON and Tile5

I've been wanting to post about GeoJSON for a while now because I like what the standard provides in terms of simplifiying interoperability.  The thing is, GeoJSON is just a standard structure for geometry and features represented in JSON, so there isn't much for me to talk about in regard to GeoJSON itself.  So what I decided to do is see how I could utilise GeoJSON to create a very simple mapping application by simplifying communication between tiers, and highlight how JavaScript mapping libraries such as Tile5 can help you achieve your vision of simplicity.

Persisted Spatial Calculation Columns

This blog post discusses how I computed the area values of the features in my spatial tables to improve query/reporting performance during my investigation of SQL Server spatial indexes.