[postgis-users] CartoWeb4 and other alternatives

[Paragon Corporation]

This may not be the best list to ask this question, but thought I would try
here first since presumably many people in this list are in the similar
boats.

I have a client who is using CartoWeb 3.3 and its heavily integrated in
their emergency response app.  They are more or less happy with it (e.g. the
ability to save views, draw widgets, print PDF maps and so forth is
important for emergency response which Cartoweb seems to do nicely without
having to install anything other than PHP and Mapserver), but they also want
to overlay third party layers like Virtual Earth.  

I heard that upcoming CartoWeb 4 will be using OpenLayers which presumably
will allow them to do just that without us having to rewrite a lot of their
existing glue code or try to build in functionality from scratch that
CartoWeb already does nicely. But I don't see any mention of it aside from
Foss4G2007 docs.
http://www.foss4g2007.org/presentations/view.php?abstract_id=216 

I thought MapFish was supposed to be CartoWeb4, but that seems to be a
completely different animal or maybe its an animal in the fetal state at the
moment and seems to have a lot more dependencies than CartoWeb3.  Anyrate I
have staff experimenting with MapFish, but from the surface it looks like
we'll have to rewrite a lot of code to swap out CartoWeb3 for Mapfish.

Does anyone happen to know if my assumptions are correct?  

Also I would be curious if people are using other frameworks similar to this
since I get asked this question a lot.  Mainly people are looking for
functionality they can integrate fairly easily and seamlessly with their
homegrown tracking applications.  By that functionality I mean

1) Print a map to PDF
2) Save named views
3) Markup Maps
4) Location short-cuts
5) Ajax map movement
6) Easy api for integrating map authentication with their main application
(e.g. controlling what groups in their app can see what maps)
7) Ability to overlay non-standard OGC mapping services (e.g. google,
virtual earth, mapquest with their custom layers)
8) Easy install on server - without having to install 20 dependencies.
9) Ideally can run on both Windows and Linux without too much fuss.

Thanks,
Regina