Geodjango - Ivor Bosloper¶

Tags: pygrunn, django

In the GIS world, everything used to be proprietary (ESRI, Oracle), but there is a lot of commoditization in the last years. Lots of open source. One of those open source pieces is geodjango.

Geodjango is bundled with Django, but out of the box you miss a couple of pieces. You need to install a couple of extra libraries (gdal, geos, proj) and you need a geospatial database (postgis, oracle, mysql, spatialite).

Ivor guided us through a sample application. Things like setting a gis database instead of a standard one. Adding django.contrib.gis to the INSTALLED_APPS setting. And special geometry fields for points, lines, polygons. Using a specific OSMGeoAdmin for showing a map in the admin interface for those geo fields.

A limitation in geodjango is that it doesn’t give you regular form fields for the geo fields. They work in the admin, but not in regular forms. Luckily django-floppyforms does provide them, so he used floppyforms to get nice forms including a map in his regular web interface. Creating geojson from database content and show that in the map.

(Note to self: look at proj4js).

Geodjango is well-integrated into Django, but you do need to use the geodjango variants of fields, databases, admins. “You need to prefix the stuff”. You get a lot out of the box, but there’s quite a learning curve. You also need to learn quite some javascript for the user interface.