Spaced Out ::

I co-convene (with my new colleague James O’Brien) a third year module on Internet GIS. In it we cover some of the broad technical and cartographic issues relating to web map servers, both lightweight, client-side solutions such as WorldKit, and server-side software such as ArcIMS and MapServer. There is a heavy dose of practical work which is designed to give the students an “edge” should they go in to industry.

Anyway, running ArcIMS and MapServer causes a bit of a headache for us in a university network environment. Given these are open labs we are not allowed to run any services on the Windows boxes. As a result ArcIMS is run in a virtual machine; not ideal, but it works. This year we have added some MapServer practicals so the question was how best to do it. Well the excellent O’Reilly Web Mapping Illustrated (written by Tyler Mitchell of DM Solutions) suggests the use of MS4W (MapServer for Windows!) because it is a distribution that includes apache and all the libraries need to run MapServer. Unfortuantely, the opening batch file runs, yes you guessed, a service. I threw this at our GIS technician (thanks Nick!) and, after a bit of “hacking” and a short visit to Portable Apps, he came up with a neat solution. Portable Apps have released portable XAMPP which is a USB version of Apache, mySQL, PHP and Perl. He’s integrated this in with all the MS4W libraries so that you run apache and can then start MapServer. A neat solution which means you can take MapServer anywhere and get it to run with no services involved at all. Neat. You can also grab it here.