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
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 19 ...
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
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...
scripting language with snippets of
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
code to handle browser functionality. The latest version as of September 6, 2007 was v2.6rc1.
Chameleon is released under the
Prior BSD License.
References
Further reading
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chameleon (Gis)
Web design
Free GIS software