geonode - geography for node.js | Hacker News Reader

geonode - geography for node.js

github.com

16 pointspaulsmith7 comments

It's not much at the moment (mostly a glorified and incomplete GEOS C API wrapper), but I am thinking about some interesting applications -- like a super-fast, non-blocking geospatial index search for millions of objects.

This is the hotness. Thanks for giving me a justifiable reason to hack on Node.js. I am going to try to tackle the Proj bindings.

Terrific! Take a look at the way GeoDjango handles transformations between coordinate systems. That's the kind of API I had in mind.

This should be a CommonJS package.

This is cool. I wonder how hard it would be to hook up to spatial databases like PostGIS?

Probably trickier than I think. I want to wrap the GDAL OGR library, which provides a common API for reading and writing spatial datasources, including PostGIS, however the trick will be the dealing with the subtleties of blocking I/O for each underlying access method (shapefiles and other file-based sources, PostGIS, ODBC, etc.).

Ryan's node_postgres add-on [1] is a good example for how one might implement this.

[1] http://github.com/ry/node_postgres

Recommendations for you:

(1) Unless there are licensing issues, you'll probably find a bunch of useful js code you can use from OpenLayers.

(2) If you can live with a separate server process, it would be handy to just stand up GeoServer (or MapServer) and serve out WFS. ('Web Feature Service', which is served-up vector features in GML based on area of interest and other query params -- OpenLayers can parse this, which is good, because you probably don't want to write it yourself.)

(This gets you a nice decoupling at the expense of being less standalone... for example, you could shell out to ogr2ogr to get your GML instead, or switch to mapserver, etc.)

Edit: Reading your other comment, it seems speed is important, so maybe (2) isn't such a good recommendation, although it might be a good starting point since it will deal with a lot of the painful stuff (format conversions, reprojections, styling...) up front.

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