Looking for examples.

[Charlie McCarty]

Recently my organization had a contractor build a simple and effective
Mapserver application.  The application works fast and well, and all around
folks like it.  It is a simple display of the current status of our
companies locations with the locations status symbolized properly.

I have built an earlier web mapping application using ArcView IMS, and was
able to bring quite a bit of ArcView native functionality through to the
users in a statefull  environment.  My MO was to tell the server to make a
new service, and redirect the user there.  It was a great deal of work, and
an experience I'd like to avoid for I believe the serving technology is just
getting better, and a desktop app wrapped up for web serving just isn't as
robust a server as it should be.

Does anyone have sites under construction - or already there - that offer a
degree of statefull  client server type functionality?  An example would be
custom class breaks and area symbols for a map layer, with a custom join of
data to boot.  Or, a custom interpolation of point data to a raster based on
a database query (pulling the x,y,and z), then presenting that to the user.

Is it possible to call to the server to quickly build an individual
mapservice, re-direct the user to it, track it for a pre-determined
lifetime, let the user make special symbology requests, and then when a
logical lifetime is up, clean up the service and server?

I have not picked up Mapserver myself, but will be doing so shortly, and am
looking for any leads in this area.