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 Howard Butler
> Sent: 04 February, 2008 12:49 PM
> To: MAPSERVER-DEV at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> Subject: Re: [MAPSERVER-DEV] feedback on possible mapserver 
> enhancements
> 
> On Feb 4, 2008, at 11:15 AM, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> 
> > 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. ;) ;)
> >
> > 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?
> 
> 
> MapServer is not a GIS!  MapServer is not a GIS!  I am not 
> supportive at all of implementing WFS-T in MapServer.  What 
> benefit is there to be gained by doing so that can't be 
> accomplished by setting up a GeoServer instance alongside 
> MapServer?  IMO, it is the best-of-breed open source WFS-T 
> that's out there, with tons of momentum and development force 
> behind it -- why go to the trouble to re-implement it in MapServer?
> 
> Technically, one challenge I see for MapServer implementing WFS-T is  
> that MapServer apps generally expect to be transient and stateless.   
> MapServer does not do well in long running processes (any 
> MapScripter who's tried can give you gobs of complaints about 
> this), and it has no concept of transactional operations 
> which I think would be very challenging to bolt on in any 
> smooth sort of way.
> 
> IMO, MapServer should continue to improve upon what it is 
> good at, and WFS-T is not something that I think it would be 
> good at without a lot of re-engineering (we hate churn, 
> remember?).  With some effort, we could have something 
> workable and maybe even functional, but it will get nowhere 
> close to what GeoServer has.
> 

Wouldn't it be great if MapServer and GeoServer worked off similar
configurations?

..Tom