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I have already built a desktop application for the management of archaeological settlements. Currently the data are stored in shapefiles (spatial data) and MYSQL (descriptive information). The application is based on MapWindow and MapWindow plugins. In the database there are some relationships between tables (one-to-many, many-to-many). I need to convert my application to a web mapping application. I intent to share my spatial data with geoserver.The web application should have forms to search the descriptive data of mysql and tools to select and zoom to the corresponting spatial data. Almost all the existed web mapping solutions have query capabilites but only on the spatial data (i.e. fields of a shapefile). Unfortunately my data are stored separately in mysql. What's the best solution to implement my web mapping application? Do I have to make custom tools? I intend to use Geomoose and some special plugins or Mapbender. Are they the appropriate platforms? I need a platform to join the spatial data and my mysql data in a easy and usefull way. I try to avoid extra programming for the forms and the connection between spatial and descriptive data. Thank you, Leonidas

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If you're starting from scratch, you should definitely use a pre-built framework. It's just duplicating effort to built from the ground up.

You can get drupal and openlayers up and running in a couple of hours, and drupal will happily handle all your other stuff you need to tack on to the main application (like about pages, contact forms, blogs).

I think if I were to implement a largish web-app that had to be optimised for efficiency, and wasn't expected to expand much out of the original scope, I'd probably start with django. It has a GIS plugin, which I haven't used, but I'm pretty sure it'd do everything your want. I think there's a django openlayers implementation too. There are django-based content management systems that you can use to handle all the other stuff I mentioned, but I don't have any experience using them.

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Yes drupal is very powerful but when I'll need any custom behaviour then I must be a guru, but I'm not.Geodjango is also very interesting project but I'm not python expert. Maybe a good start is using Openlayers and Geoext for handling spatial data and a php framwork as Code Igniter for non spatial data. – Leonidas Liakos Aug 29 '12 at 11:00
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@LeonidasLiakos: No more so than any other framework, and certainly less so than for trying to write your own web app from scratch. Certainly, if you're familiar with a particular language that's suitable for web apps, then you should find a framework based in that language. If not, then building a web app from scratch isn't going to be a walk in the park.. – naught101 Aug 29 '12 at 13:46
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in my opinion you should consider change database to PostGIS. If I were you, (I guess only opensource software is in your range?) I would base application on geoserver http://geoserver.org/ it is very good geospatial server with nice GUI. You can connect it to PostgreSQL (PostGIS exactly). When you have these two, you can upload directly from shapefile data to postGIS by geoserver, and then only thing you have to do is create SLD file (it is cartographic presentation of data) and create simple website based on openLayers framework http://openlayers.org/. If you wanna to create more complicated application you can consider using geoExt library http://geoext.org/. I think that if you have any idea about programming you will create application based on examples very quickly. :)

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Yes I'm going to migrate my data to geoserver.The problem is the interaction between spatial and non spatial data. Maybe I should use some programming to buid custom forms with Geoext or Mapfish or something like that. Thank you! – Leonidas Liakos Aug 29 '12 at 10:48
i think that integrating non spatial data isn't problem - you can create intersect table in mysql with ID of objects and its coordinates. In openLayers/MapBender create onClick event to get spatial XY coordinates of mouse click, and then by using for eg. AJAX conntect to MySQL and return data from database. – Krystian Aug 29 '12 at 11:55

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