Month: August 2003

SVG links and resources

Data-Driven SVG Apps: A Rapid Development Approach
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/02/13/svg.html?page=1
 
Consider the business example of a building floor plan. The user wants to be able to pull up a digital image (GIF or JPEG file) of the floor plan; review and annotate the drawing to note locations of electrical outlets, phone jacks, and ethernet jacks; and save the changes into a database. Annotations are done by creating red rectangles for electrical outlets, blue rectangles for phone jacks, and green rectangles for Ethernet jacks. In addition to the graphics, the user can specify properties like the number of electrical outlets at the location, the number of phone jacks and the telephone numbers at each location; and the number of Ethernet jacks and the IP addresses at the location. For the above example, the appeal of SVG is that an XML document can be created dynamically on the server while pulling content (graphical and business) from a database, while changes made by the user can be updated in the database. This role is traditionally performed by the middle tier. The middle tier, in this case, will create the SVG file by extracting data from database, and parse the SVG file and update the database. [Full Article]
Demo that shows dragging houses onto a satellite map and then entering data.
 
Includes detailed explanation of how-to. Data is stored in an Oracle
Example of a database-driven map using PostgreSQL and the PostGIS plug-in
http://www.svgopen.org/papers/2002/foerster_winter__atlas_of_tyrol/
 
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL database, follows the “Simple Features Specification for SQL” defined by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) and allows to store, index and query geometric features like point, line, polygon, multipoint, multiline, multipolygon
and geometry collections in 2d as well as 3d coordinate space. [Full Article]

Finished Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods last week. What a good book! I could really relate to the sometimes comical things that happened to him as he prepared for and embarked on his journey along the Appalachian Trail. His observation of the progression of the states of filth you go through on the trail are right on. (I’ve never hiked the AT, as Bryson calls it, for any serious length but I did spend time in the Mt. Rainier back-country which I’ll have to blog about when I get some time).

The description of Bryson’s early encounter with Katz, a man Bryson hadn’t seen in many years and who would turn out to be his companion on the trail, had me rolling in laughter.

The book is a good mix of facts about the famous trail and its environs as well as a humorous travel narrative. Don’t expect a nail-biting, life-or-death, man-against-nature, survival-against-all-odds story.

Interwoven and iManage are merging. Interwoven is making a play to compete directly with IBM and Documentum by adding collaboration to their offering. And, this makes iManage more of a player in ECM. See the press release for more details.

Revisiting Zope. For years I’ve been following the adventures of Zope, an open source application server that is particularly adept at content management. The Zope engine and its layered applications are written in Python, and the whole system is built on top of a Python-based object database called ZODB. Having done a lot of Zope development myself, I know firsthand how powerful and productive this arrangement can be. Admittedly it’s an unorthodox approach that an enterprise IT planner might be reluctant to bet on. But as I learned recently on a visit to Zope’s headquarters in Fredericksburg, Va., some big organizations are doing just that. NATO’s worldwide intranet, for example, is based on Zope. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] … [Jon’s Radio]