featureserver authentication
As the name implies, featureserver serves vector features to various formats from a number of datasources, including OGR -- which means pretty much any vector format. That's extremely powerful. Really. That means, for instance, that when you're working on a really cool project and all anyone wants to know is if they can see it in KML/Google Earth, it's no extra work. Just point them to the REST-ful url like "http://example.com/featureserver/all.kml", and continue working on the cool project. Likewise for all.gml, .atom, etc. And, if you have a project with spatial data, if you put it in a format that featureserver understands, it's displayable, and editable in openlayers. The next thing people want in a web application is some sort of user restrictions. In featureserver, by default, anyone can do any of the CRUD operations on any feature. I've been playing with a soon-to-be-open-sourced PPGIS (apparently the trendy acronym for that is now VGI ) projec