Sally's Summit Summary

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Hi Sean,

I wasn't there ofcourse, but I do remember some image caching e-mail discussions with Daniel from before the conference.

I think this applies mostly to the Mapserver WMS client, which retrieves images from several remote services. Those images could be cached similar to how the WFS client caches GML.

But ofcourse even in that case a caching proxy could do the same job, but maybe as a slight draw-back that we might run into some fights with system administration people when implementing a solution. 

In some cases I have encountered it isn't even allowed to have a server process make outbound http requests to remote services, sometimes over ports different than 80, so Mapserver WMS client is always a bit difficult with respect to system administration aspects.

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
>>> Sean Gillies <sgillies at FRII.COM> 06/21/05 06:51 AM >>>
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