mapserver, flash, and worldkit

[Mikel Maron]

Hello Developers

Wanted to write an introduction and solicit feedback on some ideas I
have for mapserver.

My name is Mikel Maron, independent developer based in the UK, and most
of my time orbits around projects with worldKit. worldKit is a light
weight web mapping application designed for non-specialists, runs in
Flash, and configured by XML. [http://brainoff.com/worldkit/].  It's
not open source, but is free to use for any not-for-profit.

I've become interested in mapserver for a few reasons: ogr support to
read VMap0 data and flash output gives potential for worldKit users to
incorporate all sorts of vector layers; also I think the worldKit
interface could be valuable to other mapserver applications, and it
enables geolocated rdf/rss data sources to be mixed into mapserver.

I've built mapserver with flash support, and added a bit of code to
support worldkit. This url is the first result of a bit of hacking and
experimentation (it might take a minute for the river layer to load).

[http://brainoff.com/mapserver/mapserv.cgi?map=/home/mikelmaron/brainoff.com/mapserver/fmv/w.map]

It's been very simple to implement. Basically, I have mapserver writing
another file called config.xml for worldkit, which references the url
of each swf layer.

What I envision is another map file option, which will trigger the
production of the worldkit config file. Besides the layers, there are
many other user configurations to control look and feel of the
application. Without knowing the details, my thought is to make
config.xml a mapserver template, and mapserver would insert the layer
references, extents, etc. Also, I'd be interested in adding a bit of
code to make layer elements addressable to worldKit.

So, as a sanity check, does this sound reasonable? Would this patch
likely be incorporated, and what is that process? Could this be added
into mapswf.c, or better in another file?

Thanks for any suggestions. Looking forward to contributing.

Mikel

ps When building mapswf.c on Debian, in calls to ming functions, I had
to cast references to ming objects like SWFShape, SWFButton, etc. to
the base class SWFCharacter. Not sure if it's something in my setup, or
a bug. If it's a bug, happy to pass on the patch with casting.