Example Technical Committee Proposal...

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> A real proposal, sample proposal template...
> 

More comments on the proposal below.

With respect to the template, the contents seems fine to me at first 
sight, but... <rant>I HATE using MS Word documents as an interchange 
format: .doc files are large, require that you launch an external 
application to view/edit them (only 15 seconds, but still 15 seconds 
wasted), and they assume that everybody lives in MS Windows/Office which 
is not true... if I use Open office to edit the doc then you may end up 
losing formatting or some information.</rant>

My personal opinion is that TSC proposals should be done either in plain 
text or ReStructured text, or another more widely supported and easier 
to deal with format.


> 
> Instead of writing a new WKT parser I would provide access to underlying GEOS functionality to do this and leverage the Geometry  shapeObj wrapper code that is already available.
> 

I believe OGR is also able to ingest WKT, and mapogr.cpp has code to 
convert OGR features to shapeObj. Should we conpare the value of using 
GEOS vs OGR for this task? Frank may be in the best position to comment 
on that. This comment is mostly driven by the fact that I have not seen 
a real need for using GEOS yet (but I'm sure that will change in the 
future), and since GDAL/OGR is used by over 90% of users, OGR may be an 
easier dependency to require than adding GEOS for those who want this 
feature.


> 
> Implementation Issues:  Biggest problem may lie with MapScript and how to integrate into the shapeObj code. Ideally one would just create an overloaded shapeObj constuctor. It’s not clear how cross-language that would be although both Perl and Python support that via SWIG. Not sure about other SWIGed languages or PHP.  Could also consider adding a method like ‘addWKT’ to the layer object.
> 

If SWIG can do it, then we'll find a way to make it work in PHP.

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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