Chameleon (GIS)
Encyclopedia
Chameleon is an open source, distributed, highly configurable, environment for developing Web Mapping applications. It is built on MapServer
as the core mapping engine and works with all MapServer supported data formats. It also works well with OpenGIS Consortium standards for Web Map Services WMS
and Web Map Context Documents (WMC) through MapServer's support for these standards.
Chameleon was originally developed in 2002 by DM Solutions Group under contract to NRCan
, in support of Canada's GeoConnections program, contributing to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). Originally named "CWC2" (CGDI WMS Client Component), Chameleon was renamed once formally released to the open source community. CWC2 was developed in response to the growing number of WMS servers and lack of user friendly WMS clients in developing web mapping applications.
Chameleon has a plugin architecture. A large number of plugins, or widgets as they are called by the Chameleon developers, are available. A Chameleon widget can implement a mapping task such as zooming, panning, showing legends, or displaying map coordinates. Over a hundred widgets are distributed with the application and developers can easily create their own widget for any specific task.
Chameleon is written in the PHP
scripting language with snippets of Javascript
code to handle browser functionality. The latest version as of September 6, 2007 was v2.6rc1
MapServer
MapServer is an open source development environment for building spatially-enabled internet applications. It can run as a CGI program or via MapScript which supports several programming languages . MapServer was developed by the University of Minnesota — so, it is often and more specifically...
as the core mapping engine and works with all MapServer supported data formats. It also works well with OpenGIS Consortium standards for Web Map Services WMS
Web Map Service
A Web Map Service is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS database...
and Web Map Context Documents (WMC) through MapServer's support for these standards.
Chameleon was originally developed in 2002 by DM Solutions Group under contract to NRCan
Natural Resources Canada
The Department of Natural Resources , operating under the FIP applied title Natural Resources Canada , is the ministry of the government of Canada responsible for natural resources, energy, minerals and metals, forests, earth sciences, mapping and remote sensing...
, in support of Canada's GeoConnections program, contributing to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). Originally named "CWC2" (CGDI WMS Client Component), Chameleon was renamed once formally released to the open source community. CWC2 was developed in response to the growing number of WMS servers and lack of user friendly WMS clients in developing web mapping applications.
Chameleon has a plugin architecture. A large number of plugins, or widgets as they are called by the Chameleon developers, are available. A Chameleon widget can implement a mapping task such as zooming, panning, showing legends, or displaying map coordinates. Over a hundred widgets are distributed with the application and developers can easily create their own widget for any specific task.
Chameleon is written in the PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
scripting language with snippets of Javascript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
code to handle browser functionality. The latest version as of September 6, 2007 was v2.6rc1