* Updated May 06, 2008

Title:  FeatureServer on Windows, with OGR Datasources (such as shapefiles)

You can run FeatureServer under IIS, Apache, or using it's own WSGI based http
server. This page outlines how to get it up and running quickly on Windows 
using the builtin http server and FWTools for supporting OGR dataformats.

1) Ensure you downloaded the "full" FeatureServer archive from 
http://featureserver.org.  This zipfile should include simplejson, paste, 
and wsgiref subfolders, amongst  others. Unzip this to somewhere (eg 
c:\temp\featureserver).

2) Go to where you unzipped featureserver, and modify featureserver.cfg 
so that the scribble layer points to a valid filename in a folder you have 
write access to (eg c:/temp/featureserver.scribble). Do not use a single 
backslash (eg c:\temp) -- use a single forward slash instead in this portion 
of the file.

3) Actually, you are done now. Assuming you already have python v2.3 or 
above installed, you can just run the featureserver_http_server.py 

However, assuming you want to use OGR datasources (eg shapefiles, or your 
SDE instance, etc), then you should install another program - one that lets
you import OGR from within python so you can access OGR datasources.  An
easy one-click install solution on Windows is FWTools.

4) Download and install FWTools from http://fwtools.maptools.org.

5) Open a command prompt (start->run->cmd) and set your fwtools environment 
variable (run, for example, "C:\Program Files\FWTools2.1.0\setfw.bat").

6) Now have fwtools' python run the basic webserver, eg:
C:\Program Files\FWTools2.0.0\python\python.exe c:\temp\featureserver\featureserver_http_server.py

6a)  Note that you can combine 5 and 6 in a simple batch file so you don't 
need to do this each time manually.

It should say it's now listening on port 8080 (you can choose your 
port with the -p switch. Choose port 80 if you don't have another 
webserver running on that already, and then you can leave the port 
out of the url you go to)..

7) Go check it out in a browser: http://localhost:8080 (or just 
http://localhost if you are running it on port 80)

You should see the list of layers (probably just the scribble layer).  
Add /scribble to your url to get to it (right now it is probably an
empty datasource, so you will get no features returned). 

Read the DataSource.txt in the doc folder and add a new OGR layer (eg 
shapefile) as they describe, by modifying featureserver.cfg - For example:

[cities]
type=OGR
dsn=c:/temp/top_cities.shp
layer=top_cities

Now, restart the webserver so it reloads the configuration, and send your 
friends to: http://your_computer_name_or_ip/cities?format=kml&maxfeatures=40 
where cities is the name of the featureserver layer you put in the brackets 
in featureserver.cfg

Now it is time to read the other stuff in the doc folder to see what kind of 
services (output and input formats) and queries are supported.