abstraction of mapogcsos.c common ogc bits

[Frank Warmerdam]

Kralidis,Tom [Burlington] wrote:
> What do people think about a generic mapowscommon.c / mapowscommon.h

Tom,

I think this seems reasonable as long as you don't feel this would
belong in mapows.c.

> This file would be a set of routines to cover the OWS Common
> Specification, and return XML objects which adhere to OWS Common.
> 
> The one immediate issue I would see is how these routines return
> objects.
> 
> With the exception of SOS, all of the other code for OGC XML is returned
> as some sort of msIO_printf.  SOS uses libxml2 to make things happen.
> 
> Maybe Assefa/others can provide comments on using libxml2 compared to
> msIO_printf for XML.  If it were up to me, I'd go with doing things the
> libxml2 way, as msIO_printf can be quite error prone for XML output and
> well formedness.  This would of course mean that any future development
> of OGC stuff in MapServer would be best to align with the libxml2 way of
> doing things.

I'm not sure I understand the implications of this.  Would this imply that
WMS server support in the short term would depend on libxml2 just for a
shared exception function?  Or is this really just about pushing other
services to use libxml2 in the future?

I'm ok with migrating to libxml2 but it will add a new dependency for
the commonly used services and so I'd rather not depend on it for
WMS/WFS/WCS until such time as we make a serious migration to it.  That
is I don't want to add a libxml2 dependency but only use it for a one
or two little things.  Does that make any sense?

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 OSGeo, http://osgeo.org