Where to start with Web GIS development, or which technology to select?

Question

I am very new to GIS development, and to be be frank I have no background about it at all. I searched the web but the tutorials I found seemed to assume the reader has some background information.

the thing is that I am confused about what to read or learn, there seems to be lots of technologies, and I feel lost since some speak about openlayers, geoserver, mapserver, google maps, and open street maps.

So here is what I am supposed to develop, and I hove you could give me an advice about which technology to use, and where should I start reading - given that I know almost nothing -.

Case 1: a closed system for about 20 users only, who can specify locations on the map, and the web application will store the latitude and longitude of the locations and show the markers. I wanted to use google maps api, but I cancelled that since there license requires you to purchase the service if the system is a closed one. so what technology should I use in such case? I need a free option, also I will be only using web server, so if the solution includes using my own geoserver, or something like that I won't be able to do it.

Case 2: I am supposed to display the roads and routes between two given points, and probably add some notes on the map. For this I case I can use my own map server/geo server, but again I want your suggestions.

of course the solution need to be open source

finally, I hope you could tell me what to start reading first,

thanks for you in advance.

Answer 1

Case 1:

Instead of Google Maps, you can use OpenLayers + OpenStreetMap. There are some books on OpenLayers and they offer numerous examples of how to use the available functionality on the OpenLayers website.

Case 2:

One out-of-the-box routing solution using OpenLayers and OSM is osm2po. It's very easy to set up and showed good performance in the short tests I've run so far. If you are happy with the pre-rendered tiles, you don't even need you own map server.

As noted in the comments, there are many other routing solutions (offline and online), including pgRouting but I think you'll only have to go down the pgRouting path if you really want something different, something the available out-of-the-box tools won't do.

Answer 2

For some of the very basic stuff try www.esri.com, they have a lot of notes on what is GIS what is a point line and polygon etc. But note that while they have some great supporting documentation, their software is expensive

also try the osgeo.org website, they have a DVD you can download and run which has a number of different open source (free) programs

OpenLayers 2.10 Beginner's Guide by Erik Hazzard is a good book to read to start with, It does help if you know some web development and have done some html coding. It also only deals with open layers which is the program which displays and allows you to interact with a map in a html web page. It is a java script library.

geoserver and mapserver basically produce "files" or services such as wfs "web feature service" and wms'web map service" along with a number of other options, you can then show this file/service in "openlayers" or another program for people to view.

google maps does the same thing as the above programs but is owned by Google and subject to their licence restrictions.

open street maps is similar to Google in that is shows streets around the world but all information is under a creative commons licence which means you are pretty much able to use the information as you wish. It is the data that you may wish to show or use with other information in your map

This is quite a complex field, not something you can learn in a week, but persevere and you will work it out.

Answer 3

Bing maps is similar to google maps and does not require a paid license. It is much slower though http://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/web.aspx