Alternate rendering engines to GD...

[Frank Warmerdam]

Steve Lime wrote:
> Yes, I think it would make sense to consider a plugin approach to rendering
> engines. That part of MapServer is setup very similar to layers. The
> outputformat mechanism also needs to be looked at.

Steve,

Yes, if we want to make output drivers pluggable, I think we might do it
by extending the outputFormatObj to include function pointers for things
like DrawLayer().   Currently I believe we do switches on the outputFormatObj
"renderer" field which is the renderer identifier.  Currently one of:

  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_GD 1
  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_SWF      2
  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_RAWDATA  3
  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_PDF  4
  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_IMAGEMAP 5
  #define MS_RENDER_WITH_SVG      6

Note, unless we have folks deploying MapServer that want to have their own
local renderers not kept in the core source code there isn't much need
to make this formally plugable.  The current switch statement approach with
#ifdef's depending on what render libraries are available is sufficient.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org