Peter,
If all you want to do is render a shapefile to a png image using a command
line (once? twice? many times?) then mapserver's shp2img is a good solution, or
even GDAL's gdal_rasterize (http://www.gdal.org/gdal_rasterize.html).
But if you need a web mapping framework (html, javascript, etc) to provide
the end-user with pan/zoom, layer selection and other tools, have a look at
GeoMoose (http://www.geomoose.org). If you're using Windows, the MS4W package
(http://www.maptools.org/ms4w/) can supply the server-side components, including
mapserver. With MS4W, you can install Geomoose and start viewing the demo data
within minutes.
And if you're looking to maximize performance of web mapping apps by
pre-rendering, you're talking about Tiling. One of the best explanation of this
I've found is at http://www.maptiler.org/. But it doesn't cover how to create
tiles of vector data. I've just started to look into this myself by reading the
Mapnik doc (http://mapnik.org/)...
Best Regards,
Brent Fraser
Peter wrote:
There is lots of documentation[2] and even a book[3].
Definition of a heavy app: one that requires a book. ;-) Honestly it
sounds scalable, robust, all round good, and ill take the thing to bed
with me for the next month, really, im a map freak.
MapServer is not so much a complete server, as just a simple CGI
executable (about a megabyte in size). You only need to [...]
and it sends you the image file back.
So, my web app is going to have to?:
- write a map file to the filesystem, something we dont do much anymore
in a word of dbs.
- open a http socket to a CGI eg
http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserv.exe?map=/ms4w/apps/tutorial/htdocs/example1-1.map&layer=states&mode=map,
really? a socket to our own machine... ok.
- which writes my png to the filesystem, where i can get at it later.
Ive used web gis apps and i know how long they take to render. Thus the
app needs to render the pngs either upon shapefile upload or overnite
via cron, and store them for subsequent user consumption. I dont require
(or want) the users to access the mapserver, hence the whole idea of
running it as a cgi is pointless. Is there a way to run it as a binary
system call?
You can also use it with MapScript for PHP or Python.
This sounds promising. Only the documentation for it comprises this:
http://mapserver.org/mapscript/introduction.html
If i committed to put this together as a php class, and GPL it, would
anybody be willing to give me a bit of a road map through the
documentation.
Regards
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