This summer I’ve spent some of my time playing around with a personal project called POIProxy.
POIProxy is a service that handles requests to any public POI service providing a well defined REST API. It’s able to parse JSON and XML responses and serve standard GeoJSON format, just providing a configuration file containing the URL and response format of the POI service to consume. And the best part, it’s free software 😉
So, the service can be consumed by any GIS client, for example it’s being used at this demo of OpenLayers social that @jacarma, @xurxosanz and @visancal developed for this year’s FOSS4G. Although one of my pending tasks was giving support to gvSIG Mini to load the data provided by POIProxy, and that’s what I’ve done this weekend.
At the moment it’s just a “Proof of Concept” as I have no more time to spend on that (but I needed to see all that POIs on Android :P). So gvSIG Mini now is able to load, display the points and alphanumerical data of any layer provided by POIProxy and cache the data on disk, to speed up the data load after the first download.
As POIProxy is able to serve points from any WFS layer, now gvSIG Mini has also that capability. This is a snapshot loading the sample “world:cities” layer that comes into a standalone geoserver distribution.
Next step should be support search and reverse geocoding from POIProxy to gvSIG Mini, so we can finally replace the retired Namefinder service.
