[OSGeo-Discuss] Best tool, shapefile to png, web

[Brent Fraser]

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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