While at FOSS4G2007 here in Victoria, I had my first introduction to MapBender and Arnulf Christi. My introduction was through a workshop entitled "Mapbender, Orchestrating the Geodata Concert". It was indeed a concert. Through the design of the software, you can pull together an instrumental or a ballad of data and imagery with ease.
Looking for a very good description of this orchestra, led me to their website, where I quote "Mapbender is the software and portal site for geodata management of OGC OWS architectures. The software provides web technology for managing spatial data services implemented in PHP, JavaScript and XML. It provides a data model and interfaces for displaying, navigating and querying OGC compliant map services. The Mapbender framework furthermore provides authentication and authorization services, OWS proxy functionality, management interfaces for user, group and service administration in WebGIS projects."
With Arnulf's planning and a strong understanding of MapBender, the workshop was a success, as we were Guinea Pigs for their online course. I do recommend to everyone new to MapBender.
I'm still finding out what software is out there in the OSGeo world, but MapBender ranks very high on my list of tools I want to keep in my toolbox.
The Press Release found on OSGeo states that minor changes were made, bugs fixes completed, a move to Trac (to keep track of changes), and Wiki to keep the project Human(e and) Readable. This is a key point, because sometimes reading code can be very inhumane (I know from experience!).
A full fledge training course (Online, I must add again!), can be found here.
I strongly encourage everyone to look at this project and delve into the training course, then look at adding MapBender to your list of tools that will allow you to build your Orchestra of Data & Maps from Services Worldwide.
