WPServer 1.1

a web mapping transformation library

Author:

[e-mail]

Copyright:

2007 Christohper Schmidt.

Version:

1.0

Manual group:

GIS Utilities

DESCRIPTION

WebProcessingServer is a simple Python-based geographic feature server. It allows you to transform geographic vector features via a number of different processing backends.

WebProcessingServer will run under Python CGI, mod_python, or as a standalone server.

WebProcessingServer is released under a license similar to the BSD license.

RUNNING UNDER CGI

• Extract the code to some web directory (e.g. in /var/www).

• Permit CGI execution in the WebProcessingServer directory. For example, if WebProcessingServer is to be run with Apache, the following must be added in your Apache configuration, where /var/www/webprocessingserver is the directory resulting from the code extraction.

  <Directory /var/www/webprocessingserver>
       AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
       Options +ExecCGI
  </Directory>

Python Prerequisites

In order to use WebProcessingServer, you must have the simplejson module installed. If you do not, you can add it by doing the following:

$ wget http://cheeseshop.python.org/packages/source/s/simplejson/simplejson-1.7.1.tar.gz $ tar -zvxf simplejson-1.7.1.tar.gz $ cp -r simplejson-1.7.1/simplejson /var/www/webprocessingserver

Note that these instructions are for Linux systems: the end goal is to extract the simplejson directory from the distribution and put it in the root of your WebProcessingServer install.

Non-standard Python Location

If your Python is not at /usr/bin/python on your system, you will need to change the first line of wps.cgi to reference the location of your Python binary. A common example is:

#!/usr/local/bin/python

Under Apache, you might see an error message like:

[Wed Mar 14 19:55:30 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] (2)No such file or
  directory: exec of '/www/wps.cgi' failed

to indicate this problem.

You can typically locate where Python is installed on your system via the command ‘which python’.

Windows users: If you are using Windows, you should change the first line of wps.cgi to read:

#!C:/Python/python.exe -u

C:/Python should match the location Python is installed under on your system. In Python 2.5, this location is C:/Python25 by default.

RUNNING UNDER MOD_PYTHON

• Extract the code to some web directory (e.g. /var/www).

• Add the following to your Apache configuration, under a <Directory> heading:

  AddHandler python-program .py
  PythonPath sys.path+['/path/to/webprocessingserver']
  PythonHandler WebProcessingServer.Server
  PythonOption WebProcessingServerConfig /path/to/webprocessingserver.cfg

• An example might look like:

  <Directory /var/www/webprocessingserver/>
     AddHandler python-program .py
     PythonPath sys.path+['/var/www/webprocessingserver']
     PythonHandler WebProcessingServer.Server
     PythonOption WebProcessingServerConfig
                  /var/www/webprocessingserver/webprocessingserver.cfg
  </Directory>

• In this example, /var/www/webprocessingserver is the directory resulting from the code extraction.

• Visit the URL described above, replacing wps.cgi with webprocessingserver.py

• If you see an empty GeoRSS file you have set up your configuration correctly. Congrats!

• Note that mod_python has not yet been well tested, and may not work well for all data sources.

RUNNING STANDALONE (UNDER WSGI)

WebProcessingServer comes with a standalone HTTP server which uses the WSGI handler. This implementation depends on Python Paste, which can be downloaded from:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/Paste

For versions of Python earlier than 2.5, you will also need to install wsgiref:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/wsgiref

Once you have all the prerequisites installed, simply run:

python wps_http_server.py

This will start a webserver listening on port 8080.

RUNNING UNDER FASTCGI

WebProcessingServer comes with a fastcgi implementation. In order to use this implementation, you will need to install flup, available from:

http://trac.saddi.com/flup

This implementation also depends on Python Paste, which can be downloaded from:

http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/Paste

Once you have done this, you can configure your fastcgi server to use webprocessingserver.fcgi.

Configuring FastCGI is beyond the scope of this documentation.

CONFIGURATION

WebProcessingServer is configured by a config file, defaulting to webprocessingserver.cfg.

SEE ALSO

http://code.google.com/p/webprocessingserver/