For local map geek coders...

[dmaze]

...the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a WMS/WFS server. Digging through the list of layers, wow, that's a lot of them. Still working on getting them interestingly integrated into OpenLayers.

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

There's also http://mass.gov/mgis/download.htm , if you want to get the raw data, which is what I used to make http://boston.freemap.in/ .

[dmaze]

I'm still using it mostly for purely client-side (Javascript, eew) rendering of my historical bike trips. But looking at this still slightly experimental page, clicking the blue + and selecting "MassGIS Elevation", does suggest that, yeah, the Climb to the Clouds has a bit of elevation change, and no, I didn't actually do the full century going over Wachusett.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Ah, you must be the friend Mark mentioned the other day. Looks like you've written a lot of code behind this! Have you found OpenLayers okay to use? (I mean, it is Javascript, after all, but still.)

[dmaze]

It's been fine. Documentation in general is kind of scanty (what's a Format? What's the relation between Features and Layers?) but this is largely made up for being non-obfuscated reasonably-formatted open source. The tricky thing has been finding useful mapping data: since I occasionally take trips out-of-state the MassGIS data is only going to be 90% of what I need, but I also depend pretty heavily on the custom vector layer in OpenLayers 2.4-to-be. But beyond that, porting the code from the Google Maps API to OpenLayers has been pretty straightforward.

The only other particularly interesting bit of code is a Python package to take TIGER/Line data, import it into a PostgreSQL database, and then generate XML from that. That code, in no particularly useful form, is here, but I have various reasons to not like it a whole lot. Generating the data became a lot easier when I got a portable GPS and could just suck GPX files off of it using gpsbabel.