feedback on possible mapserver enhancements

[Kralidis,Tom [Burlington]]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: UMN MapServer Developers List 
> [mailto:MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On Behalf Of Daniel Morissette
> Sent: 04 February, 2008 12:16 PM
> To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: Re: [MAPSERVER-DEV] feedback on possible mapserver 
> enhancements
> 
> thomas bonfort wrote:
> >>> And last but not least :
> >>> * what would you think of having a wfs-t implementation for 
> >>> mapserver, probably at first limited to postgis backends, 
> and based 
> >>> on the tinyows project?
> >> A year ago I would have said no, but several times in 
> recent months 
> >> I've had questions from folks that seem to use WFS-T as a means of 
> >> selecting their web rendering tool. It's becoming a 
> differentiating 
> >> feature. I'm not familiar with TinyOWS though. Are you 
> suggesting assimilating TinyOWS?
> > 
> > the advantage of this would be to avoid having to deploy another 
> > server along side mapserver in order to treat the wfs-t side of an 
> > application,as you pointed out. in finality it would mean 
> porting of 
> > the tinyows code into mapserver.
> > 
> 
> There is so much demand for WFS-T by our users that I am 
> slowly giving up and starting to think that we may have to do 
> WFS-T in the end. Please don't tell anyone that I wrote that. ;) ;)
> 

Yes! :)

> I am not sure about integrating TinyOWS code... I have never 
> looked at TinyOWS, but wouldn't a simple merge be messy? How 
> would that fit with existing mapwfs.c code? Could we not just 
> extend the current implementation (and make the necessary 
> architecture changes) to support transactions?
> 

I think extending mapwfs.c with optional transaction would be preferred,
IMHO.  Assefa and I discussed this awhile back and mapwfs.c we would
need mapwfs.c to handle the messaging and (maybe) maptransaction.c to
take care of the lower level stuff (and thus make it available to other
interfaces if / when).  Specifying transactional support could either be
thrown as a ./configure flag, or a metadata value, depending.

..Tom