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Comment by wlievens | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to OpenLayers? Does it follow the OGC specs such as WMS, WFS, etc?

Edit: okay, it does vector tiling. That's very nice. OpenLayers' vector support scales badly so this might help.

I have another question on that regard. How do you "put it all together"? Specially if you want to host your maps locally. Mapserver, Openlayers, OSM data, QGIS, ... I don't know where to start.

Any good references? (I tried google. I will myself check out http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/MappingYourData , but the more the better.)

Here is a nice tutorial on how set up a server to render tiles with Mapnik:

http://weait.com/content/build-your-own-openstreetmap-server

If you want to serve tiles you would then have to take a look at mod_tile: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mod_tile

Great. Thank you for the pointers.

http://simplegeo.com/ is trying to fill this niche. They provide a simple API for storing and querying geospatial data.

GeoServer + PostGIS is the typical setup, in my experience it's "light" enough.

Mate, I think polymaps would struggle a little with the OGC stuff. I haven't had experience with the OGC standards in depth, but I have worked with deCarta who implement OpenLS for their webservices and knowing what was involved there it's probably a little beyond the scope of what the guys are trying to achieve in the polymaps project.

From what I can tell, Polymaps is definitely optimized for retrieving map tiles that conform to some kind of algorithmically determinable tile url (such as OSM, Google, Bing, etc).

WMS tiles are designated by such an URL. Implementing a WMS subset sufficient for something like this is close to trivial.

Good to know - thanks :)

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