It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled with anything Boundless. So I had some time on my hands and decided to take a look at the newest community suite. I had intended to write up a review full of acronyms and and technical babble. I became a bit sidetracked so this is more of a soft review of the Suite and more of a “there’s a lot of stuff up there” post.
Anyway – for those of you who have no idea what a Boundless is: they are a commercial firm that provides support for open source products like postgis, geoserver, etc. They have built those components into a product called “Boundless Suite” (or Boundless Server). They have other offerings they’ve developed to help folks with geospatial data (like Boundless Connect). You can purchase support for the Boundless suite. If you don’t you can get the last release which is a community release for free. I downloaded 4.9.1 and my only complaint will be it is a bit dated. It was release in Dec 2016 if I’ve read everything correctly….BUT – I’m using it as we speak and loading data into it so it’s usable.
The nice thing with the suite is you get a feel of “how things work”. I get a lot of questions when I’m out and about on “What is an “Open Source GIS Server?”. The ESRI folk are a bit confused as that’s a Product you buy. Here it’s something you put together to fit your needs. In this case the Suite is:
- Geoserver
- PostGIS
- GeoWebCache
- GeoComposer
- WPSBuilder
I won’t get into all the technical of what I did but in short:
- Download the ISO file from Boundless after creating a login into Boundless Connect
- Import it into VirtualBox
- Start the Dashboard
I’ve been exploring. The Geocomposer feature is something new and nice to play with. The Web SDK isn’t functional as downloaded but I’ve been digging and I think I can download the needed components. Which really highlights the documentation.
If you’ve been curious as to how all these components work together now is your chance to download the suite and READ THE DIRECTIONS. Which has pretty much derailed my techobabble post. I get bogged down enough in things that I sometimes miss software happenings outside of PostGIS/QGIS. All the components have also made me dig back into web mapping. I know – not that big of a deal but for a one man shop I have to learn when I’m not doing everything else.
So on the blog post I ask myself a question. Would I run it? Yes and No. It works well. I’ve got a server capable of storing data, running services, and it’s functional within about 15 minutes. I hooked QGIS (2.18.14) to it and loaded data. I can also download the components and start building my own server setup after learning how all this works together to get more current components. Of course there’s always the support question – You can run a more current setup by paying support to Boundless. I have 0 idea of what that runs.
Anyway – I’m going to continue messing around with the VM and reading more of the documentation. Learn some new software!
In between writing this – I loaded data into a map running from the VM
