[Mapserver-users] ActiveX IIS and Mapscript.

[Ed McNierney]

Dean -

The primary issue with a COM object interfacing to the MapScript libraries is the issue of multithreading support, which IIS requires.  The issue of thread safety is well-known and a lot of folks have been putting a lot of effort into it.  Once we've got a good multithreaded base, a VBScript-compatible COM wrapper is a pretty simple task; until then, I (at least) have concluded it's not worth the trouble.

As Chip says, however, it's very easy to write VBScript ASP code that programmatically builds MapServer CGI calls.  With that you can do really quite a lot (but not everything) that a MapScript interface does.  The primary value of a multithreaded COM server is the ability to have a single module serving multiple clients, rather than launching a new CGI for each one (although the cost of doing that is often overstated).

	- Ed

Ed McNierney
President and Chief Mapmaker
TopoZone.com / Maps a la carte, Inc.
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA  01863
ed at topozone.com
(978) 251-4242 

-----Original Message-----
From: Chip Hankley [mailto:Chip.Hankley at rmtinc.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 9:51 AM
To: dtaylor at karjeni.com.au; mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: Re: [Mapserver-users] ActiveX IIS and Mapscript.


Dean,

>Basically what I want to do is get a Mapscript application working with IIS
>without resorting to having to install PHP or perl and preferably without
>needing a java engine installed either. The Mapscript application will
>basically read from catalogue and present the maps.
>
>So -
>Is there a COM component around that can be used within ASP. the archives
>suggest a demand for, and some work being completed towards an ActiveX
>component bit this seems to have petered out. (What happened?)
 
I asked this question a couple of years ago. My hunch is that everyone who has gone done this path has come to the conclusion that PHP and/or Perl (afaik, the Perl version of MapScript still doesn't work on Windows) work so darn well that trying to support VBScript/ASP just isn't worth the effort. I'm not an ASP person, but I work with a lot of ASP people. I've been running PHP/MapScript on IIS living in peaceful coexistance w/ ASP applications for a couple years now... IMHO, PHP is so far superior to ASP as to be, well, I'm not sure of the best adjective.
 
That said, if you REALLY want to use ASP, search the archives for a note from Ed McNierny on this subject. There are some pretty elegant work arounds that will allow you to use ASP (or PHP, or ColdFusion, or Perl) to hit the mapserver.exe, and pull back relevant information that can then be used by the scripting engine of your choice to make more dynamic pages.
 
Also, as Steve Lime pointed out the other day, you can do a lot of REALLY cool stuff with the plain-jane cgi mapserver, especially when you throw all of the DHTML tools in the mix... so, make sure that you REALLY need mapscript.
 
>Has anybody
>successfully compiled them using Borland C++ (Command Line)? Am I setting
>myself up for a fall suggesting that I will have a go at creating them. (I
>am not a C/C++ Programmer but have done a reasonable amount of
>programming in other languages).

Not sure about this, but, as far as compiling the other stuff on Windows goes, the $100 (or so) you'd spend on VC++ is worth your time. Almost all of the libraries that are out there have vc++ makefiles, but NOT Borland makefiles. ASFAIK, they are NOT interchangeable. So, you could end up re-creating Borland makefiles for every library you need... I'm sure everyone would appreciate your efforts in doing that, but I'd imagine you'd spend a LOT of time doing it.

Cheers!

Chip Hankley



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