Rails GIS Hack Slides are now available for download at rails.nomad-labs. Also on SlideShare Enjoy!

In case you are wondering why I’m not at foss4g2007 I’m in Bremerhaven, Germany visiting AWI.

Alessandro Pasotti has authored a utility to output mapserver layers as KML for display on Google Earth. This is written in PHP mapscript so will require mapscript to be installed with your standard Mapserver installation. Check it out here.

Although its a useful tool, it would be nice to have kml support in mapserver (C++) out of the box. Apparently expected is the release of libkml in 2008. So mapserver may have to wait for google to release libkml before adding native C++ support, provided the licensing is favorable.

Its been a great 2-3 days hangin’ with some of my hero’s from the Ruby/Rails world. On Friday we had dinner with Dr Nic and today I learnt about the finer points of RSpec with Dr Nic and Geoffrey of Peepcode fame at the Sankt Oberholz.

Geoffrey also made the fatal mistake of showing Aleks his iPhone who completely ignored his celebrity status and spent the rest of the afternoon playing with his phone.

Kashif in the spirit of good hostmanship has put up a map on the nomad-labs rails blog especially setup for RailsConf Europe 2007. So if you are here and want to know about where all the hip people hang do check it out!

Kashif has also ended up with a bottle of cognac thanks to our new Romanian friend :)

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