[mapserver-users] Great Circle Rendering

[chris at planethaste.com]

Hello list,

As a complete newcomer to WMS I’m looking to make a decision as to which
WMS is best suited for my requirements.

With this in mind I have a question on MapServer in relation to one of my
requirements.

How easy is it use mapserver for the following:

I would like to use MapServer to “serve” a simple map depicting parts of
the world and capital cities. The region to be covered would be defined as
would the required projection. On to this “background”  I would like to be
able to draw a great circle between two of the cities ‘on the fly’ and
have all visible entities (coastline, cities and Great Circle) correctly
rendered for the specified projection.

Assuming that country and city information was available in a useable
format e.g. ShapeFile  and the http request indicated the bounding region
and the two cities that need to be linked by a great circle how easy would
this be to do in MapServer?

The part that I am completely ignorant in is the rendering of the great
circle between the two sets of lat/long keeping in mind that this part
(the required pair of cities) would potentially be different for each
request.

Any indication as to how easy this is to do or how to go about doing it
would be greatly received.

Thanks

Chris