Getting started with Geomajas

To create the simple project with the Maven archetype, you need to install Maven on your system. Maven can be downloaded from http://maven.apache.org/. We recommend using the latest stable version (2.2.1 at the time of writing). Installing Maven is quite simple: unzip the distribution file in the directory of your choice and make some environment changes so you can run the executable mvn. More information for your specific OS can be found at the bottom of http://maven.apache.org/download.html.

At this point it is assumed that Maven has been successfully installed. Using Maven, you can now create your Geomajas project, called the Geomajas GWT Application archetype.

Once you have your Geomajas project running, you might want to make some modifications to the Geomajas configuration and customize it. More details about the Geomajas configuration can be found in the developer's guide.

Here you find the most important configuration files used in your Geomajas project:

If you have the jetty server running and you make changes to the configuration, press ENTER to reload the application without stopping the server.

The Geomajas sample application comes with a predefined layer configuration for PostgreSQL/PostGIS and SQLServer databases (configurations for other supported databases like Oracle and MySQL can be added in a similar way).

To activate the database layer, the following steps should be taken:

The archetype generates a dependency on the geomajas-dep project to manage the version of the Geomajas dependencies. This project exists for the sole purpose of keeping track of the latest released versions. It is quite likely that a new version of geomajas-dep has been released since the latest release of the archetype. Therefore, we recommend you update this dependency to the latest version. You can check the latest version using this URL: http://repo.geomajas.org/nexus/index.html#nexus-search;quick~geomajas-dep.

References which may be interesting to read:

The combination of Eclipse, maven and GWT is not quite trivial, especially for advanced multi-module projects like Geomajas. There are 2 approaches possible for integrating eclipse with maven:

It is clear that an IDE integrated solution like m2eclipse offers considerable advantages over manually generating Eclipse project configurations:

For a functional Geomajas setup, the following Eclipse plug-ins should be installed on a fresh Galileo download (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/):

<listener>
 <listener-class>org.geomajas.servlet.PrepareScanningContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>

The setup in IntelliJ IDEA is quite straightforward and does not require running a separate Maven command. Just open the project from IDEA by selecting the pom in the root directory.

Figure 2.9. Open project using pom

IDEA will recognize this as a GWT project and assign the correct facet but as always you will have to make your own run configuration (which is fortunately trivial). You will need version 9.0 or later for the GWT 2.0 support.

Figure 2.10. IDEA GWT run configuration

Before being able to use this configuration, you need to invoke the gwt:i18n Maven target to assure the files which are used for internationalisation are available (otherwise, you will get compilation errors). You can do this from the "Maven projects" tab.

Figure 2.11. run gwt:i18 target

Some additional settings have to be done in the "project structure" dialog. Apart from specifying the GWT installation directory, there is a specific project setting which has to be done manually, which is setting the target Web facet to "Web". The project structure for the simple GWT project should look as follows:

Figure 2.12. Project structure for simple GWT project

After this, you should be able to run the project. Any changes in the source code will be automatically detected, and debugging is possible.

You can both create the project from the archetype or open directly the Maven project in NetBeans. See http://wiki.netbeans.org/MavenBestPractices for more details.

Geomajas is a free and open source GIS application framework for building rich internet applications. It has sophisticated capabilities for displaying and managing geospatial information. The modular design makes it easily extensible. The stateless client-server architecture guarantees endless scalability. The focus of Geomajas is to provide a platform for server-side integration of geospatial data, allowing multiple users to control and manage the data from within their own browser. In essence, Geomajas provides a set of powerful building blocks, from which the most advanced GIS applications can easily be built. Key features include:

See http://www.geomajas.org/.

Copyright © 2009-2010 Geosparc nv.

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

The project also depends on various other open source projects which have their respective licenses.

From the Geomajas source (possibly specific module), the dependencies can be displayed using the "mvn dependency:tree" command.

For the dependencies of the Geomajas back-end, we only allow dependencies which are freely distributable for commercial purposes (this for example excludes GPL and AGPL licensed dependencies).

This framework and documentation was written by the Geomajas Developers. If you have questions, found a bug or have enhancements, please contact us through the user fora at http://www.geomajas.org/.

List of contributors for this manual: