[Freegis-list] Cost Effective WebGIS

[Jeff McKenna]

Hi Satyajit,

As Bart mentioned, MapServer is an excellent alternative to the big 
"costly software" that you mentioned.  MapServer's native data format is 
ESRI shapefiles, so no data conversion is required in your case.  I 
would suggest taking a look at Chameleon 
(http://www.maptools.org/chameleon/index.phtml) which allows for easy 
MapServer application development.

have fun.

jeff




Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Your best bet would be:
> 
> PostGIS (http://postgis.refractions.net) together with Mapserver 
> (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu).
> 
> And yes, open source will fullfill your requirements in my opinion.
> 
> Best regards,
> Bart
> 
> On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 11:43:23 +0530, Satyajit 
> <satyajit.gantayat at aurovision.com> wrote:
> 
>> HI folks,
>>        With the increasing sharing of GIS data on net, our institution
>> is also taking a plunge in it. We have some GIS data in ESRI shapefile
>> format. The requirement is to make this data available to users through
>> net. Since this is not for any commercial purpose we won't be able to
>> make use of the costly softwares like ArcIMS or Autodesk Mapguide for
>> this project. I am looking for a cost effective solution to acheive
>> this. I understand that I'll have to use an application server, a
>> databse server and a spatial server. Can anyone please suggest me a
>> right combination which is cost effective. I certainly don't expect a
>> large of number of hits on my site but it should be reliable. Will any
>> opensource solution suffice my requirement ? There are so many
>> opensource/free solutions mentioned on the site that, its confusing as
>> which one I should consider.
>> Thanks in anticipation
>>
>