0

Currently I'm working on a web mapping project, where users can calculate a heatmap raster geotiff based on their inputs and view it in Openlayers afterwards. Raster calculations are done on serverside with geotools.

The way I go is like this:

  • user fills out some input parameters on jsp page, that are sent to the servlet
  • the servlet uses the geotools library and postgis data to calculate a heatmap
  • the heatmap is saved (curently local) as a geotiff
  • the geotiff is uploaded to geoserver and provided as a WMS Service

Now my question:
This way is error-prone (probably memory issues), but in general working. However it's not very straight forward. Is there a better way to send a just temporarily used geotiff/raster to Openlayers on the clients page? So to avoid geoserver and WMS service?

If not, how could I use geoserver smarter? At the moment each client gets an "own" temporary workspace (workspacename+ unique key) to save his raster so he can not see the rasters of other users, the workspace is deleted on page closed.

Augustus Francis
  • 2,694
  • 4
  • 22
  • 32
Chris
  • 4,238
  • 4
  • 28
  • 49
  • OpenLayers supports client-side heatmaps too. Is this something you could use? I don't know how complex your calcuations are. – John Powell Jun 08 '14 at 17:06
  • have you thought about using the WPS plugin with GeoServer which handles many of these issues for you. http://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/extensions/wps/processes.html – Ian Turton Jun 09 '14 at 08:13
  • Thanks for the hints. Regarding heatmaps directly in Openlayers, I'm not sure if it fits my needs, as there are several thousands points to calculate the raster from and I think security issues are smaller if the database connection is done from the server. But it's worth a closer look, so thanks. About WPS I did not think yet, as I'm not so experienced. But I will have a look and see what it's possibilities are. Thank you. – Chris Jun 09 '14 at 08:58
  • In my experience with GeoServer, it can handle a very large number of requests -- we have single servers running over a million tiles per day in production producing rasters from vector databases, a similar use case. One issue you can run into is very long startup times if you have a lot of data sources that need to be checked, but it sounds like yours are all temporary, so, presumably you won't run into this problem. – John Powell Jun 09 '14 at 09:24
  • no, with startup times I had no trouble so far. The only thing is, that with creating and deleting temporary workspaces through REST for each client, the process does not seem to be very straight forward. Furthermore, the data is not deleted on local drive (even though the workspace in geoserver is). So either I delete the files with a command in the servlet, or manually. – Chris Jun 09 '14 at 10:05

0 Answers0