What he’s presenting is work done for the “UEWA” project (Ueberregionalen Wasserbewirtschaftung des Kanalsystems zwischen Rhein und Oder). Some of the project’s needs:
Maps (of course) and tabular data.
Schematical overview of the water system, including detailed data on the actual geometry.
Editing of data, so users/roles and security.
Depending on your role, the UI (user interface) should be different.
They used as much open source as possible, but one element is proprietary. Standards were used where possible. Some technologies: oracle (the proprietary part), mapfish, tomcat, linux, openlayers, ExtJS, geoext, cherry on ext.
The client is a self-made html/javascript/css web application. Extjs is wonderful to get a great user interface. [He showed the interface and one thing that struck me was that the schematical overview (so: just a couple of straight lines and some icons) of the water system was shown as a regular map. Hey, I haven’t thought of such a thing yet.]
The tabular data is shown using extjs’s grid. They also allow to split the table up a bit by adding headers for the first sort key and a sub-table with just the items with that header below it. “Cherry on ext” adds a couple of widgets to extjs, for instance an extra nice filter widget.
All the various open source components work together very well. And the high quality of the individual pieces made it possible to make this website.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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