News 18-05-2003

News 18-12-2002

What is grules?

Grules is a buggy piece of code which allows you to easily(?) show your nifty geographical maps over the web. Its most useful feature is the possibility to link graphical properties (colours, textures, labels) of the objects in your maps to values in remote databases.

It comes in four pieces: a server (grulesd), a couple of cgi (map and info) and a project editor and an HTML-javascript interface builder.

Features:

• supports grass vector, raster and site formats.
• supports shapfile and tiff format.
• database support (postgres, informix, interbase, dbf and mysql)
• customizable, template driven HTML output.
• feature selection by point, shape hilight.
• TrueType font support.
• Scale dependent drawing.
• It is fast.
• Nice and simple(?) Javascript user interface.
• Talks XML.
• The system is flexible and easily(?) scalable.

What do I need to use grules?

Grules is a software for publishing maps on the web so first of all you need the maps. You can either use grass format or shapfile. You may need to show (variable) data associated to these maps so you better have a DBMS, unless you prefer to fiddle with dbf.

If you want to use grules to build a web site (what else?), you need of course a web server (like apache).

Next you need grules executables (see download for info) and some patience to build the project configuration and interface files (see User manual),

You can build the sources (tested under Linux, Solaris, Windows2000(Cygwin and a lot of luck and goodwill) or if you are a lucky linux-i386 user just copy the binaries. (Much easier).

Licence Terms and Credits.

Grules is released under the GPL licence.
This means essentially you are free to use, distribute and modify (hopefully improve) this code, and so must remain everyone. The author is me, myself in person: Federico Ponchio.

This project started in August 1999 from an idea of Rocco Mauro Bueti working in the "Soprintendenza... di Pisa", was developed for some months by Attilio Vaccaro and me.

A year after the "Ente Regione Toscana" was interested in the project and decided to use it and to pay for development. And here it is. Well, it took a while but here it is.

Special thanx to:

• "Ente Regione Toscana" the sponsor.
• Mauro Bueti: for the original idea, support, and perseverance.
• Attilio Vaccaro: for sharing with me the pain.
• Angelo Marcotulli: for his invaluable help and insightful advices.
• Flavio Tani: for providing some nice graphics.
• Gabriele Garau: for porting the Javascript into the IE version.
• Paolo Gatti: every minute i talk with him i spare a day coding.
• ? Galardi: for thinking this thing can be useful.
• Viviana Cossi: for using, testing and developing this thing with me, not for the fainthearted.
• Maria Pacelli: she knows why.
• Martin Aliger for a lot of patches.