Sally's Summit Summary

[Paul Ramsey]

Steve,
Thanks for the summary, I am sorry I missed the summit, but the Twins 
were playing so we did baseball instead.

- Paul Spencer and I also talked about "magic projection" support. Many 
formats have projection information embedded or alongside, so having to 
redundently specify them in the map file is not the most user-friendly 
approach. Like the "wms_extent", projection blocks should really only be 
required "as necessary". I think this can be done relatively easily, by 
adding some projection setting code into the LayerOpen area of each 
driver, and agreeing on some heuristics:

o If there is a PROJECTION in the map file, then don't overwrite it.

Paul

Steve Lime wrote:

> Hi All: Just a quick summary of what we chatted about on Saturday
> evening at Sally's. Please add too this as you search your memory...
> 
> We talked about several general areas of new development:
> 
> 1) a new rendering back-end for high quality raster output- both
> cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/) and Anti-Grain
> (http://antigrain.com/) were discussed. Both seem to be a bit
> immature with tiny developer communities. I'd like to offer up
> ImageMagick as another possiblity - very mature, antialiased lines
> plus a host of other image manipulation stuff. Just another one to do
> evaluation on. This might manifest itself as a single "QUALITY"
> option with values like HIGH/REGULAR.
> 
> 2) splined or path following text labels. (Unfortunately none of the
> graphics libs mentioned support this out of the box... *sigh*)
> 
> 3) an updated symbol/style model that leverages or follows a standard
> such as SLD or CSS. CSS may be prefered at this point- SVG like
> support for styles. Concensus was that a change like this would
> necessitate a MapServer 5.0 release.
> 
> 4) image caching, that is changing the way the CGI writes file names.
> Talked about md5 hashes, plus a multiple directory storage option.
> Might manifest itself as a "IMAGECACHE ON/OFF" option...
> 
> 5) plug-in support for input formats (as a start).
> 
> We also chatted about a tentative release schedule. A version 4.8 in
> December, with a 5.0 sometime before the 2006 conference.
> 
> That's what I took away from that meeting. Great to see everyone!
> 
> Steve