i. About

The 'maps' directory contains a Pylons[1] project. Pylons is a
framework for developing web applications in Python. To "run" the
application, you need to host the maps project on a web
server. Fortunately, there is a lightweight Python web server provided
for you that can do this (at least locally.

The command to start the server is,

  paster serve --reload development.ini

which tells the "paster" command that it should load the environment
contained in the development.ini file. The --reload argument simply
tells the application to reload automatically if any of its files are
changed.

A helper script, start-server will run this command for you. By
default, the web server process will run in the foreground. You can
tell it to run in the background by ending the command with a '&',
e.g.,

  ./start-server &

Paster will default to running on http://127.0.0.1:5000, which you can
visit in your browser.


[1] http://pylonshq.com/


ii. Installation

Pylons is supplied by most major Linux distributions, but
unfortunately, we require version 0.9.7 or greater. If your
distribution has a previous version, you can get away with using
easy_install to install version 0.9.7. For example, on Ubuntu 9.04,

  sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
  sudo easy_install Pylons==0.9.7

Here, the first command installs python-setuptools, the package that
contains the easy_install utility.