Geomajas Community Documentation
Geomajas provides a basic set of functionality as part of the back-end core. This can be extended and made available using plug-ins. One of the functions of the back-end core is to act as a plug-in container. Plug-ins are optional libraries that extend the core functionality by taking advantage of the public API. There are three special types of plug-ins, faces, layers and security plug-ins. which provide extra features, faces, layers and other plu
Faces provide external interfaces for Geomajas. These give access to users or external systems to the configured data. The faces which are included in the Geomajas project are
GWT face : our recommended face for displaying and editing GIS data in the browser. This allows you to build your web user interface in Java.
dojo face : a face which allows web display and editing using dojo toolkit. The user interface needs to be developed using JavaScript.
The layer plug-ins provide access to the actual data which needs to be displayed as part of a maps. There are basically two types of layers, providing either raster data (bitmaps) or vector data. The layers which are provided as part of the normal distribution include
geomajas-layer-hibernate (vector): allow access to any kind of features which are stored in a spatial (relational) database. The data is accessed using the hibernate and hibernate-spatial open source libraries.
geomajas-layer-geotools (vector): access data from any vector data source which has a GeoTools data store defined for it (http://geotools.org/javadocs/org/geotools/data/DataStore.html).
geomajas-layer-google (raster): include Google rasters. This allows access to the normal and satellite views provided by Google. You still have to make sure you comply with Google terms of use (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/).
geomajas-layer-openstreetmap (raster): support for raster data coming from the OpenStreetMap project (http://www.openstreetmap.org/).
geomajas-layer-wms (raster): access data from a WMS server (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms).
geomajas-layer-shapeinmem (vector): access data from an ESRI shape file which handled in memory. The actual data access if done using GeoTools (http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/shapefile.pdf).
Other plug-ins allow extensions in functionality, either by providing additional commands or extending the rendering pipelines, or they provide additional security services.
geomajas-command : set of commands which are provided as part of the standard distribution. This is so fundamental to using Geomajas that it is provided as a back-end module.
geomajas-plugin-printing : printing extensions for the framework
geomajas-plugin-staticsecurity : a basic security service which can be configured as part of the Spring configuration and does not use an external source for users or policies, making the security configuration entirely static.
The back-end also contains a set of spatial services. These include services for accessing raster and vector services and a set of utility services.