Sally's Summit Summary

[Sean Gillies]

On Jun 20, 2005, at 1:45 PM, 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
>

Y'all must have discussed image caching before I joined. Has no one 
used Squid?

   http://www.squid-cache.org/

What are the special cases that can't be handled by a web proxy?

Sean