[Mapserver-users] What doesn't MapServer do?

[ANDY CANFIELD]

I think also a lot of people expect desktop style GIS functionality and that 
warning is simply there to let them know that it is web mapping engine not a 
desktop GIS system. If you need desktop GIS as an open source solution you 
can always use GRASS it's home page is here: http://grass.itc.it/

Geocoding was the only web mapping thing I needed at first in my app to do 
that Mapserver didn't do natively. I simply wrote an add-in for php in C 
that does the geocoding part. So when I load the php_mapscript .dll I also 
load my goecoding engine .dll. It ended up working very well. It uses GDT 
data from shapefiles, it wouldn't take much to scale it to use a MySql 
backend as an alternative to shapefiles. So far for me adding php extensions 
in C to tack on the extra functionality seems to run much quicker than when 
I wrote the same thing directly in php. So every add-on since then I have 
done as a php extension .dll in C.

The point being that Mapserver is really an engine, you build an app on top 
of or beside that engine.

I have used the proprietary solutions also like ESRI's ArcIMS and MapInfo's 
MapXtreme. As with Mapserver they are engines you build your app on top of 
them just like with Mapserver. And speaking from personal experience the 
Mapserver API and php mapscript API is way, way, way easier to implement and 
use than MapXtreme's Java edition and ArcIMS was also dog slow compared to 
Mapserver. Mapserver and MapXtreme Java seem to run about the same speed to 
me.

However just to give you an example of what you save with Mapserver, I have 
roughly 1,400 users of my web apps using Mapserver behind our company 
firewall (intranet). MapXtreme was what we used for some other solutions at 
a corporate level in the past cost us $150,000+ for that number of users. 
The current Mapserver solutions are at a market level not an enterprise 
level but they ended up having the same amount of users due to the nature of 
the apps. So we saved $150,000+ on the Mapserver apps.

What Mapinfo won't tell you until they give you fifty million sales pitches 
is the price of MapXtreme. So I'll save you the trouble and let you know up 
front. It's $360 per user plus a mandatory $72 dollar per user maintenance 
fee. Those are in US dollars. Free with a bit less functionality out of the 
box which you can add yourself or $150,000+ and either way you still build 
the app on top of either engine.

I can tell you this much we'll never use MapXtreme at a market level and 
there is a very strong case being made to port the existing enterprise 
solutions to Mapserver and drop MapXtreme totally.

I don't know how much the ArcIMS stuff cost because I started developing at 
my current employer after those had been written. But I would guess it's 
roughly the same as MapXtreme as they are competing solutions.

So in my personal opinion "what doesn't Mapserver do?" absolutely nothing 
you can't add if it doesn't have it already, most of which it does. My two 
cents anyway.
Thanks,
Andy

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