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

[Peter]

> There is lots of documentation[2] and even a book[3].

Definition of a heavy app: one that requires a book. ;-) Honestly it sounds scalable, robust, all round good, and ill take the thing to bed with me for the next month, really, im a map freak.

> MapServer is not so much a complete server, as just a simple CGI
> executable (about a megabyte in size). You only need to [...]
>  and it sends you the image file back.

So, my web app is going to have to?:
- write a map file to the filesystem, something we dont do much anymore in a word of dbs.
- open a http socket to a CGI eg http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserv.exe?map=/ms4w/apps/tutorial/htdocs/example1-1.map&layer=states&mode=map, really? a socket to our own machine... ok.
- which writes my png to the filesystem, where i can get at it later.

Ive used web gis apps and i know how long they take to render. Thus the app needs to render the pngs either upon shapefile upload or overnite via cron, and store them for subsequent user consumption. I dont require (or want) the users to access the mapserver, hence the whole idea of running it as a cgi is pointless. Is there a way to run it as a binary system call?

> You can also use it with MapScript for PHP or Python.

This sounds promising. Only the documentation for it comprises this:

http://mapserver.org/mapscript/introduction.html


If i committed to put this together as a php class, and GPL it, would anybody be willing to give me a bit of a road map through the documentation.

Regards