The demand for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) services and tools continues to rise. This was reflected in a recent industry survey in which 73% of respondents noted experiencing a growth in demand for GIS services. Many of the respondents already include GIS in their survey workflow or offer it as a service, and when asked which GIS tools have the most potential, 42% reported Mobile GIS Applications, with cloud-based GIS Applications/Web Portals next at 27%.1
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Posts Tagged ‘geospatial’
How GIS Professionals Can Create a Flexible, Mobile Workflow
Wednesday, July 15th, 2015Census Mapping Made Easy with OpenLayers 3
Tuesday, July 8th, 2014Three months ago, Paul Ramsey created a tutorial that builds an example census mapping application using OpenGeo Suite. Since then, we’ve released OpenGeo Suite 4.0, which includes early access to OpenLayers 3, and we’ve updated the tutorial to use OpenLayers 3 instead of GeoExt.
A Different Approach
GeoExt, a combination of ExtJS and OpenLayers 2, allows one to create web applications without writing any HTML and CSS, which was useful back when all browsers behaved differently. However, with HTML5 and CSS3 available in all modern browsers, a more modular stack adds flexibility.
With GeoExt, the easiest way to read in the list of available census variables (topics) was to pre-process them and load them as JSON. Rather than spending much time on user interface work, we’ve added Bootstrap to leverage the JQuery dependency and save some lines of JavaScript code. With JQuery, a few lines of code are enough to create drop-down options directly from the lines of the original metadata text file:
