WPServer

a web mapping transformation library

Project description

Author:	crschmidt@metacarta.com
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: