FeatureServer Versus MapFish Server

I thought I could say a few words on the differences between FeatureServer and MapFish Server.

First, FeatureServer and MapFish Server have similarities. They share a similar, REST-based protocol, for creating, reading, updating and deleting features.

The main difference between the two: FeatureServer is a standalone application, MapFish Server is a web-mapping development framework.

FeatureServer is perfect for very rapidly setting up editable layers, with no custom needs. MapFish Server is good if you work on a customer project, with specific, customer-oriented needs; MapFish
Server provides a complete development framework, which, thanks to the great components it relies on (Pylons, SQLAlchemy, Shapely, etc.) allows to write high-quality and maintainable code.

Two different goals.

MapFish 1.0

MapFish 1.0 is out!

The things I really like in MapFish 1.0:

• The PDF Printing Library. Everyone wants to print maps, Patrick has turned everyone’s dream into reality. The PDF Printing Library is great, it supports fancy stuff like vector rendering, map rotation, legend, etc. See this page to know more. And there’s more to come, support for printing map annotations is about to make it into trunk.
• MapFish Server implementation of the MapFish Protocol for creating, reading, updating and deleting features. We still need to add a feature editing widget to MapFish Client, the feature editing panel, currently demo’ed here, will probably make it into trunk soon.
• MapFish Client relying on the OpenLayers protocol abstraction. With that every MapFish Searcher component can work with the MapFish Protocol as well as with any other protocols supported by OpenLayers (e.g. Gears, WFS).
• The feature reader, and mediator components we have added to widgets/data. These are core classes to bridge OpenLayers and Ext. And by the way, these classes will probably represent the first bits put in GeoExt; more on that later…
• The API doc that covers both MapFish Client and OpenLayers.

There are other stuff in MapFish 1.0, the above are just the ones I care the most about.