Rolling Your Own Google Maps, part II

In part one of this series, we showed you how to create your own “slippy map” in 200 lines of JavaScript. In this talk, we turn our focus to a couple of open source mapping frameworks (MapBuilder and OpenLayers) that do the same thing, but with many more features.

Based on the book Pragmatic GIS, this talk will give you a step by step demonstration of how to build your own Google Maps using nothing but open source software including PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and GeoServer. We'll discuss open data exchange standards like the Open Geospatial Consortium's web services like Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). We'll also discuss how to use the free, public domain map data made available by various governmental agencies from the US and abroad.

If you've had no previous mapping experience, this talk breaks the domain down into easy to understand concepts. You'll come out with a better understanding of the challenges and rewards of hosting your own web mapping infrastructure.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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