Sally's Summit Summary

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Glad to hear the conference was a good one again, I am 
sorry I missed it this time.

What I miss in this list is a re-design of the query mechanism so it will work more efficient for spatial RDBMS data sources. Is this still on the roadmap?

Best regards,
Bart

Bart van den Eijnden
Syncera IT Solutions
Postbus 270
2600 AG  DELFT

tel.nr.: 015-7512436
email: BEN at Syncera-ITSolutions.nl
>>> Steve Lime <steve.lime at DNR.STATE.MN.US> 06/20/05 20:46 PM >>>
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