Sally's Summit Summary

[Steve Lime]

Hi All: Just a quick summary of what we chatted about on Saturday evening at Sally's. Please add too this as you search your memory...

We talked about several general areas of new development:

1) a new rendering back-end for high quality raster output- both cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/) and Anti-Grain (http://antigrain.com/) were discussed. Both seem to be a bit immature with tiny developer communities. I'd like to offer up ImageMagick as another possiblity - very mature, antialiased lines plus a host of other image manipulation stuff. Just another one to do evaluation on. This might manifest itself as a single "QUALITY" option with values like HIGH/REGULAR.

2) splined or path following text labels. (Unfortunately none of the graphics libs mentioned support this out of the box... *sigh*)

3) an updated symbol/style model that leverages or follows a standard such as SLD or CSS. CSS may be prefered at this point- SVG like support for styles. Concensus was that a change like this would necessitate a MapServer 5.0 release.

4) image caching, that is changing the way the CGI writes file names. Talked about md5 hashes, plus a multiple directory storage option. Might manifest itself as a "IMAGECACHE ON/OFF" option...

5) plug-in support for input formats (as a start).

We also chatted about a tentative release schedule. A version 4.8 in December, with a 5.0 sometime before the 2006 conference.

That's what I took away from that meeting. Great to see everyone!

Steve