Sally's Summit Summary

[Daniel Morissette]

Thanks for taking time to write down the summary Steve, I can't think of 
anything missing at the moment.

I would perhaps just add quick note for the users who are following this 
list: at this point, 5 organizations using MapServer have expressed 
interest in better rendering, especially antialiased thick lines, and in 
curved labels (items #1 and #2 in the list) and are willing to put some 
money towards funding that. However I don't think we'd have enough 
funding to move ahead yet, so if you, your organization or your clients 
are interested in seeing items #1 and #2 happen quickly and would be 
able to contribute to their funding, then please talk to me. I am 
thinking that DM Solutions could act as the prime contractor for those 
two features and sub-contract parts to the other MapServer core 
developers as required.

Daniel


Steve Lime wrote:
> 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
> 
> 


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