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

[Brent Fraser]

Dependencies are a blessing and a curse.  The great thing about MS4W is 
it supplies PHP Mapscript (along with a nice Windows installer for 
Apache, Mapserver, Proj4, and GDAL), which GeoMOOSE uses for the 
server-side  scripting of various services.  The other distributions 
don't  [usually?] supply PHP Mapscript, but they do supply the more 
popular (and better maintained?) Python Mapscript.

   Maybe it's time to put the PHP scripts through the ol' PHP2Python-izer...

Best Regards,
Brent Fraser

On 5/26/2015 3:05 PM, Eli Adam wrote:
> 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
>>