[Geomoose-users] A look to the future of GeoMoose?

[Eli Adam]

Hi Bob,

On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 12:41 PM, Bistrais, Bob <Bob.Bistrais at maine.gov> wrote:
> First, a sincere thanks to everyone involved in the development and support
> of GeoMoose, it’s a great product.
>
>
>
> With regard to the future, I know that GeoMoose continues to evolve and I’m
> happy to see that.  My concern is with the MS4W backend, which apparently is
> not being further developed for Windows.  We are concerned about that at my

MS4W != MapServer.  See also other Windows MapServer distirbutions:

OSGeo4W: http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/x86_64/versions.html
Nightly builds (including of stable): http://www.gisinternals.com/

> organization, and are looking at a possible move to using GeoServer on the

So MS4W not releasing doesn't logically lead to GeoServer (or other
MapServer replacements).  You organization could also contact Jeff
about funding a release, I'm not sure if that is an option.

> backend.  I know that others on this forum have successfully used GeoServer
> with GM.  My question is how to handle any custom queries and functions.
> With MS4W, we build custom functions with PHP MapScript.   What are people
> doing with a GeoServer backend?  What is being planned for future releases
> of GeoMoose to allow for this?

More full featured support of GeoServer and other rendering engines is
indeed a great idea, however, there are plenty of reasons to pursue
that other than one MapServer binary distribution not releasing at
high frequency.  That seems to be incorrectly conflating issues.

Indeed, perhaps the project should look at which Windows package to
build off of.  It was very useful for years to build off of the MS4W
distribution which provided a base for many MapServer projects to
build on top of.  GeoMoose could be packaged in OSGeo4W.  It would
still have a convenient installer that provides a working stack.
GeoMoose would also get the exposure of all the OSGeo4W users.  It
might mean more involvement with OSGeo4W to keep GeoMoose working with
the rest of the stack and coordinating dependencies.

To me this is two mostly unrelated issues:
1) default (complete) Windows GeoMoose distribution
2) Improve (or abstract) support for additional rendering engines
(GeoServer, Mapnik, QGIS Server, etc)  - this topic could leads to
other architecture discussions like WFS, WPS, client-side services,
etc.

Best regards, Eli

>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bob
>
>
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