[OSGeo-Discuss] Best tool, shapefile to png, web

[Mike Toews]

On 16 August 2010 13:41, Peter <webwiz at pl.net> wrote:
> And theres something called mapserver which seems to be a complete service.
>  Sounds heavy.

MapServer is not so much a complete server, as just a simple CGI
executable (about a megabyte in size). You only need to craft a MAP
file, which is a tricky text file telling the layer source and how it
is stylized. You can connect to most things, including MySQL[1] and
Shapefiles. To get a PNG, you only need to POST a few parameters to
the executable, and it sends you the image file back. You can also use
it with MapScript for PHP or Python. There is lots of documentation[2]
and even a book[3].

-Mike

[1] http://mapserver.org/input/vector/mysql.html
[2] http://mapserver.org/introduction.html
[3] http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590594908