<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body { font-variant: normal; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-top: 4px; line-height: normal; margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px }
p { margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0 }
-->
</style>
</head>
<body style="margin-bottom: 1px; margin-top: 4px; margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px">
<p style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0">
<font size="3" face="Comic Sans MS">All,</font> </p>
<br>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0">
<font size="3" face="Comic Sans MS">Well, one could go old school, and just store the SHP files as the sourced data. Have mapserver read them directly, either via a dynamically modified index file, or via dynamically built MAPFILE. This would be just about the least amount of moving parts and still get you what you are looking for. I would still suggest moving to a DB a some point, but this would get things organized for a DB move at a later date.</font> </p>
<br>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0">
<font size="3" face="Comic Sans MS">bobb</font> </p>
<br>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0">
<br>
<br>
>>> Peter <webwiz@pl.net> wrote:<br> </p>
<div style="padding-left: 7px; margin-bottom: 0; background-color: #f3f3f3; border-left: solid 1px #050505; margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-left: 15px">
<p style="margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0">
> There is lots of documentation[2] and even a book[3].<br><br>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.<br><br>> MapServer is not so much a complete server, as just a simple CGI<br>> executable (about a megabyte in size). You only need to [...]<br>>  and it sends you the image file back.<br><br>So, my web app is going to have to?:<br>- write a map file to the filesystem, something we dont do much anymore in a word of dbs.<br>- open a http socket to a CGI eg <a href="http://localhost/cgi">http://localhost/cgi</a>-bin/mapserv.exe?map=/ms4w/apps/tutorial/htdocs/example1-1.map&layer=states&mode=map, really? a socket to our own machine... ok.<br>- which writes my png to the filesystem, where i can get at it later.<br><br>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?<br><br>> You can also use it with MapScript for PHP or Python.<br><br>This sounds promising. Only the documentation for it comprises this:<br><br><a href="http://mapserver.org/mapscript/introduction.html">http://mapserver.org/mapscript/introduction.html</a><br><br><br>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.<br><br>Regards<br><br><br><br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Discuss mailing list<br>Discuss@lists.osgeo.org<br><a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss</a><br>
</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>