This week we are rounding out our busy year of FOSSGIS training activities with a week course on using Mapserver, OpenLayers and Django. On Monday we covered Mapserver and the particpants were quickly able to produce good looking WMS services by building their maps in QGIS and exporting them to Mapserver .map files. Today it was the turn of OpenLayers and we loosly followed the great OpenGeo Openlayers Training Course. It was a departure for me to use someone else’s training notes since I normally write my own. I probably will return to using my own course notes always since the OpenGeo notes were in some places too complex for what I needed to show and occasionally had issues with example urls not working for web services etc. That said I am very grateful to the OpenGeo folk for making their notes available – I learned a few things myself along the way.
Our course attendees (only four people this time around which makes it nice and personal) seem to be learning a lot and enjoying themselves. One thing I love about FOSSGIS and Linux is how easy it is to get all the software installed and running. Bochengedu, one of our attendees (from Botswana) didnt have Ubuntu on his laptop as required for the course. So in between lecturing yesterday I installed vmware player, ubuntu 9.10 into the VM (it was the only i386 iso I had handy), set up PostgreSQL / PostGIS / QGIS / Mapserver etc. – all in only a few minutes of my time. Try doing the same thing setting up e.g. Windows + Oracle Spatial + ArcServer etc….I’m sure it would be a challenge.
I’ll post the revised django course notes and the notes I made for the mapserver part of the course here some time next week. Can’t wait to dive into django with the particpants tomorrow – its always a pleasure to show it to people!


hdus
… mmmmmm and the exquisite cookies in the middle of the table!
…
Great work Tim go ahead with your FOSSGIS training in Africa! I’m looking forward to learn django with your django course notes.
Tim Sutton
Hmm you have a keen eye for a cookie! That is programmer fuel
spatialguru
You’re inspiring me to do a road tour across north america.. have van, Linux.. will travel.
Tim Sutton
I’m inspiring myself to do a road trip across Africa
One day….