[Geomoose-users] Migrating from GeoMOOSE 2.2 to 2.6 - Mapserver compatibility considerations

[Jim Klassen]

Interesting late Friday afternoon question.

What will likely become 2.4.1 is sitting in SVN right now, and it includes the patches I applied to make it work on the OSGeo LiveDVD with MapServer 6.0.x.  There were mapfile changes and changes to the PHP scripts. (For those who are interested: http://www.geomoose.org/downloads/geomoose-2.4-mapserver-6.patch)

I don't remember the differences between 2.2 and 2.4(.1) to know how much of a upgrade problem that would be.  As I remember 2.4 was mostly clearing bugs from 2.2 after the project sat at 2.2 for a year.

There are two parts to running a mixed-mapserver version:
1) Updating the mapfiles to work with MapServer 6.0 and be accessed as WMS (for map viewing)

This part isn't too hard and in the Linux world, I've run multiple MapServer versions side by side for a long time.  I presume it would be possible to put a MapServer 6.x binary (and DLLs?) in a folder next to the 5.x version in MS4W too and effectively create /cgi-bin/mapserv and /cgi-bin/mapserv6.

Since both GeoMoose versions can access WMS, you should be able to migrate the mapfiles to MapServer 6.x and then change the 2.2 mapbook to view the new version of the layers.

2) The tricky part comes with the PHP services (query/print/...)
There were patches to the 2.4 PHP services to make them work with MapScript 6.0.  I don't know if the patched services will still work with 5.x.  The catch is that the mapfile version needs to match the MapServer/MapScript version.  This is a short coming of the current PHP services implementation.  St. Paul GISmo chose a different trade off that allowed it to be datasource (and thus MapServer version) agnostic but the cost was it was slower on queries/joins/selects and couldn't do label collision between layers on printing.

There may also be a PHP version difference between the MS4W versions (and thus make it hard to run both php_mapscript modules at the same time in the same web server.)

I'm hoping (for 3.0?) that as the transition to OGC services (WMS/WFS) continues that we can re-establish the separation between a data source/service and processing operations that consume the data, we will again be rid of most of these all-or-nothing upgrade hassles.


On Apr 20, 2012, at 3:51 PM, Mark Volz wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> I am running several GeoMOOSE 2.2 sites on Mapserver 5.x.  I am wondering about the best way to migrate to GeoMOOSE 2.6.  It is my understanding that 2.6 will require Mapserver 6, which GeoMOOSE 2.2 is not compatible with.
>  
> The way I see it I have a couple choices:
>  
> Upgrade all of our applications at once.  This would be technically simple as there would only be one Mapserver running.  However, some of the people that we work with might not want GeoMOOSE 2.6, and since I would need to upgrade all of our applications quickly, it would give me less time to polish up each site.
> Run a two copies of Mapserver (MS4W).  I could also run two copies of Mapserver, however this would involve opening up another port or IP address in our firewall, which I am not sure if our IT folks will like.
>  
> I would like to know how other people (specifically those that will have to work with several GeoMOOSE applications) are planning to upgrade their sites to 2.6 when it does come out.
>  
> Also, I thought I heard that GeoMOOSE 2.4.1 might be released so that it will work with Mapserver 6.x.  As far as I know GeoMOOSE 2.4.x is very similar to  2.2.  Would it be easy to upgrade all of my sites from GeoMOOSE 2.2 to 2.4.1?  That way I could take my time upgrading my applications from GeoMOOSE 2.4.1 to GeoMOOSE 2.6.
>  
> Thanks
>  
> Mark Volz
> GIS Specialist
>  
>  
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> Geomoose-users at lists.osgeo.org
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