Alternate rendering engines to GD...

[Tamas Szekeres]

Yes, we might want to render onto a device context (eg a Win32 GDI screen
device context) that is somewhat platform dependent and should not directly
embed into the mapserver code. However Cairo may also provide an abstraction
level targeting theese type of issues.


Tamas


-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Developers List [mailto:MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Steve Lime
Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2006 7:43 PM
To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: Alternate rendering engines to GD...

Don't know about local renderers (I didn't figure there would be many with
local data reading needs). That would be a question for others in the group.
Perhaps Tamas had a reason in mind. 

Steve

>>> Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> 5/23/2006 11:37 AM >>>
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,
-- 
---------------------------------------+------------------------------------
--
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 

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