Boundless stack
Overview
Boundless Geospatial provides commercial support for open source geospatial software.
"Boundless" is now bounded by paywalls and subscriptions. Back a couple years ago I talked to them at a FOSS4G conference and they seemed so bright eyed and helpful. I am sad today because every time I find material about them I hit a wall when I try to do anything.
My impression is they pretty much built up the GeoServer I have come to know and love. They used to offer direct support to the open source community but that seems to be dead now.
By building a stack on this particular set of projects they did a great service to the community even if you can't afford to pay them for support. RIP.
Github: The sea of lost projects
Github is a Sargasso Sea of projects and Esri and Boundless have thrown many into the morass. I have too but I am just some random guy using their servers as place to tether my code so I can't misplace it. I am not claiming to be an Enterprise Leader. Anyway.
I tried a few boundless/* things until I was ready to give up. Things like boundless/composer with 100's of security faults.
What is in the Boundless stack?
- QGIS on the desktop
- Boundless Composer is for authoring maps
- OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for building web maps.
- GeoServer http://geoserver.org/ Front end for geospatial repository https://github.com/Geo-CEG/docker-geoserver
- GeoGig http://geogig.org/ There is a GeoServer plugin for change management https://github.com/Geo-CEG/docker-geogig
- GeoWebCache http://geowebcache.org/ will cache pre-rendered tiles coming from Geoerver
- PostGIS Used as a data repository for GeoServer but capable of full SQL processing of spatial data.
See this page: Boundless committed to open source and their github page: https://github.com/boundlessgeo (where you will find they have committed code but failed to maintain it.)
I would consider adding OpenDataKit to this stack.
Maybe VirtualBox will work
...or maybe when I look for it I will hit a paywall. :-(
How building GeoNode fails
Download and build
cd source/docker git clone [email protected]:boundlessgeo/geonode.git cd geonode docker-compose build
This build includes
- postgres
- elasticsearch (had to modify the compose file as there is no elasticsearch:latest tag, I used 6.6.0)
- rabbitmq
- django
- celery
- geoserver (built on tomcat 9)
- geonode (built on geonode/nginx)
- ArcREST
It keeps its data in a data container called geoserver_data_dir
docker-compose up . . . Creating geonode_rabbitmq_1 ... done Creating geonode_postgres_1 ... done Creating geonode_elasticsearch_1 ... done Creating geoserver_data_dir ... done Creating geonode_geoserver_1 ... done Creating geonode_celery_1 ... error Creating geonode_django_1 ... error
Who needs django and celery anyway? Oh right -- that's basically the underpinnings what I wanted to test today, geonode. That makes Boundless currently a non-starter. Trying GeoNode official version instead!
There's a quote regarding open source about "the smartest people don't work in your company" and I think that's true about Boundless. OKAY to be fair, I could spend perhaps another day and get it going. But I just don't know if I even want to use GeoNode yet. I probably don't.
The thing is, if I contracted with Boundless doubtless I could spend 4 hours on the phone and they'd help me set it up, but first I'd have to be convinced I was not just substituting Boundless for ESRI and just beholden to a new master.
