wishlists

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Daniel, regarding your idea of pre-generating raster tiles out of vector
street data and serving them, it would be very nice to have Label-EZ
integrated into Mapserver, since performance is not the biggest issue
anymore when you are pre-generating anyway. Whatever happened to the
integration of Mapserver and Label-EZ?

Thanks everybody for their input. I have got a far better view now where
the software *could* be heading to.

I think parts of this discussion might also be useful for the
mapserver-users list, so I'll make a summary and will post it to the user
list.

Best regards,
Bart

> Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
>>
>> What else is on the lists?
>>
>
> Personally I find that we've got a quite complete set of features, so my
> personal wishes would go towards improving what's there instead of
> adding new features:
>
> - Performance tuning
>
> - Security audits
>
> - Easy installation. We've started work on that with MS4W and FGS, but
> there is still lots of work to do.
>
> - Any tools that can make it easier for new users to get up to speed
> with the software quickly.
>
> And finally, one new feature idea:
>
> - Ability to work in pre-canned-maps-mode:
>
> I'm sure you've all seen Google and its (obviously) pre-canned map
> tiles. Well, back in 1999, before we found MapServer, that's the
> direction in which we were going with webmapping at DMSG and Google
> reminded me of this idea a few weeks ago. This idea was inspired from
> what a few other sites were doing at the time so it's not new and I
> can't take credit for inventing it. But then we found MapServer and it's
> performance and robustness was just so impressive (compared to the
> alternatives of those days) that we dropped this idea of pre-generating
> the maps since that was not necessary any more for the types of sites
> that we were working on.
>
> I think that one of MapServer's next challenges is to be able to serve
> the needs of the high traffic sites that produce tens or hundreds of
> millions of maps per month, always based on the same *static* street
> data. If you generate the maps on the fly with a relatively complex
> mapfile based on vector data with street labelling, etc, then you can
> only get a few million maps per month per CPU. Imagine the server farm
> you'd need for 100 million maps.
>
> OTOH, since the street data is static, you could pregenerate the maps as
> tiled rasters for a number of preset scales, configure one raster layer
> per scale, add a little bit of logic in MapServer to force it to use a
> discrete number of scales and you're running. You can still plot points
> on top of the map, do queries, or do anything else that MapServer was
> doing before... you just don't render the static street data all the time.
>
> That would require lots of disk space in some cases, but disk space is
> cheap as I keep being reminded... and for the cases where it's not
> practical to pregenerate all the maps, I've also got some ideas for a
> hybrid mode where the vector layers kick in if no raster tile was found
> for the current map area.
>
> Combine that with a fastcgi (or persistent mapscript) that preloads the
> mapfile and the raster tileindex in memory and you'd be flying!
>
> Daniel
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>   Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
>   DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>