On the OpenShift blog Ryan Jarvinen has a new tutorial showing you how to use MongoDB and Silex to create a basic mapping service. It takes advantage of the MongoDB spatial data and query functionality to help locate and map items from the dataset.

Whether your goals are civic-minded or otherwise, PHP can help you craft solutions that are every bit as simple and elegant as what you might expect to see from modern Python, Ruby, or JavaScript frameworks. This particular example is intended to serve as a reusable template for folks who are interested in producing their own mapping applications - substituting in their own collection of map points or other spatial data.

He starts with a look at the datastore - the MongoDB - and the kind of data it will contain. He's shared the dataset (and complete example code too) over on Github and includes the command to import it. He then starts in on the PHP side of things, showing you how to get Silex installed and add in some basic routes and CSS. He then uses the Leaflet.js library to import the data and drop it into an Openstreetmap-based map. The full code and data can be found in this repository over on Github.

On the EngineYard site today there's a new podcast released with Elizabeth Naramore interviewing Derick Rethans (of 10gen) about MongoDb and the OpenStreetMap project.

Derick gives a little background about himself (including being a PHP evangelist for 10gen) and how he ended up working with MongoDB. They talk about how MongoDb is different and some of the involvement he has in contributing to open source projects and the OpenStreetMap project.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the file directly.

Ken Guest has a new post today talking about a PEAR package he's been developing, Services_Openstreetmap, to interact with the OpenStreetMap service to make it simpler to work with OSM data, adding new locations and working with users.

So over the last while, I've been working on a PHP package imaginatively named Services_Openstreetmap, for interacting with the openstreetmap API. I initially needed it so I could search for certain POIs and tabulate the results; it's now also capable of adding data to the openstreetmap database - nodes and other elements can be created, updated and so on. It will even access the details of the user that is being used to modify that data, which is one difference between it and the other single purpose OSM frameworks.

He's submitted it to PEAR for official inclusion. Until then, you can download the package from github. The OpenStreetMap project is a community-driven mapping tool that allows users to provide new map information or make updates in an effort to keep things more up to date.

Derick Rethans has a new post today with a bit of code showing how to combine Flickr and OpenStreetMap and make a mapping tool that plots out the location information for the Flickr images.

I like taking pictures, and I usually take a GPS so that I can place them on a map on my Flickr page. On my last excursion however, the battery of my GPS had died, so I did not have location information available to store in my pictures' EXIF headers. Flickr can use the EXIF headers to then show the images on the map. Because I did not have the location information to automatically place my pictures on the map, I wanted to do that by hand.

His script (as used by a local Squid proxy) supports two different versions of the mapping - one for Yahoo! Maps and the other for OpenStreetMaps'. You can see the end result here - a set of Flickr images with a map in the background.