Ghent, Belgium – October 20, 2009 – Geosparc, the company commercially supporting the Open Source GIS Application Framework Geomajas, today announced that it will be present at Foss4G, the international conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial), Sydney 20 – 23 October 2009, Booth 19.

Two of its key software developers, Jan De Moerloose - Software Architect - and Pieter De Graef – Community Manager and Lead Developer -  will give presentations. The Company also has a booth at Foss4G where, due to an increasing demand for Geomajas applications, it will focus on actively recruiting partners worldwide.

Jan De Moerloose presentation, scheduled for Friday 23 October, will be about: Beyond "press Ctrl-P" in web map printing.

The situation is quite familiar for many end users: on-line maps provide a tremendous choice in flexibility when it comes to navigation or even manipulating your own data. But when it comes to making a print, people are left with the all too common “use your browser’s built-in print function”, leading to unsightly prints that may be sufficient for the occasional trip to the coast, but are far from the professional looking prints you used to achieve with your favourite thick client viewer. Jan will present a novel approach to web map printing based on a component-based template for the print that can be both visualized and manipulated by the end user. Powerpoint-like flexibility is available to the user in positioning, resizing and customizing components like maps, legends, text labels, images, view ports, etc.. Finished templates can be sent to the server for rendering in PDF (using iText library) and saved for later re-use.

Pieter De Graef presentation, also scheduled for Friday 23 October, tackles the subject: Web GIS: from Javascript to GWT.

This presentation will address the specific problems developers encounter when programming thin client GIS applications. Pieter will talk about browser compatibility issues, thin client vector technologies such as SVG and VML and formulate a possible solution. Pieter’s experience of working in a Javascript environment comes from working on the Geomajas Open Source project for several years. Geomajas is a client-server GIS application framework built on top of the Dojo Ajax library, specialized in advanced editing and object-relation modelling. Working in a Javascript environment presents a difficult choice of technologies. What widget framework to use? What’s the performance trade-off between vectors and rasters? Why can’t we simply use Flex? This presentation will show all the choices we have made while creating the Geomajas application framework, and why we’ve made them. Issues ranging from performance to development time, have contributed in the final choice to leave Javascript behind and make the switch to GWT.

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ABOUT GEOSPARC ( www.geosparc.com)  

Geosparc was founded in December 2008 and is the company that commercially supports the Open Source GIS application framework Geomajas, coupling the innovation of Open Source with the stability of a true enterprise-class application framework. The Open Source model enables Geosparc to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the Open Source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost. Geosparc’s goal is to not only provide an Open Source offering but to complement it with commercial services and offerings such as support level agreements, OEM agreements, project support, consulting services, training services and support services for configuration, implementation and development.

For more information go to www.geosparc.com

MEDIA CONTACT

Jan Poté, Marketing & Communication Manager
Tel +32 (0)475 92 55 82, 
E-mail: Email Contact