[mapguide-internals] RE: Motion: RFC 30 - FDO Configuration

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jason Birch wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> The more I think about this RFC, the less I feel that it is a good idea to
> link the web tier directly against FDO and use the overrides.  It breaks the
> nice hierarchical architecture of MapGuide, and ties into a section of FDO
> is not all that well understood outside of the core development team.
> 
> Personally, I think that it would be easier to maintain going forward with a
> back end that generates config files using simple sprintf's against template
> XML, like I did with my cruddy little PHP script for creating raster config
> files.

Folks,

I avoided commenting on this RFC before because it is a MapGuide RFC, and
because I just didn't understand a lot about it.

But I am wondering if the RFC 30 utility stuff will be built on the FDO
raster provider override API or will it just construct configuration xml?

I'd like to discourage use of the raster provider override api, partly
because while the GDAL and ATIL raster providers use the same configuration
files, it is not at all clear that the override apis are exactly the same.
When I added bounds support I was not aware of any particular requirements
on how override api stuff should be named, etc.  (I'm still not clear on
this).

Perhaps it was never the intent to use the override api for this purpose?
I certainly can't see how use of the override api would work if we want
folks to be able to introduce new raster providers in the future without
this utility having to be recompiled.

Actually, another thing that was unclear to me is whether this
configuration utility will have an actual UI or is it just classes?
If it is just a bunch of classes to produce config xml it seems ... well
like a lot of stuff that doesn't do much.  But perhaps I'm just exposing
my roots as a hacker instead of a good software engineer...

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org