Introduction to Geomajas

As the field of web GIS becomes more and more saturated, it becomes increasingly difficult to chose the correct technologies to solve our needs. This workshop will show you how to set up an attractive and user friendly web GIS application capable of working with thousands of vector objects on the map. The goal of this workshop will be two-fold: to demonstrate the easiness of creating your first Geomajas application and to display how to handle very large data sets without having to turn to WMS to keep the performance at an acceptable level. The main technology used in this workshop is a client-server framework, called Geomajas. The focus of Geomajas is to provide a platform for server-side integration of geospatial data, allowing multiple users to control and manage the data from within their own browsers. By leveraging GWT, Geomajas provides a full Java approach to build end-to-end solutions for the web. In this workshop we will effectively start from scratch. Within mere seconds you will have your first application up and running. From there on we will start adding layers, and basic functionalities through configuration. All configuration in Geomajas is provided through a series of XML files. The manipulation of these XML files is the subject of this workshop. As the main topic for this workshop, a very large data set will be used to configure a vector layer within the application. Using Geomajas, you will learn how it is possible to edit, select, search etc on data sets so large that other web GIS technologies can't handle them anymore. In the end each user will have learned how to quickly set up a stunning web GIS application capable of handling thousands of vector objects while keeping the same performance level as thick clients.