feedback on possible mapserver enhancements

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 05, 2008 at 02:24:13PM -0500, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>> Daniel Morissette wrote:
>>> Steve Lime wrote:
>>>> Good suggestions Arnulf. I too think a WFS-T-lite makes good sense.
>>> Without having done much research, I like that idea as well.
>>>
>>> Daniel
>> I would like to add my +1 to having some type of WFS-T support within 
>> mapserver.
>>
>> My basic use-case would be something like using OpenLayers with 
>> mapserver serving images, and want to be able to support simple point, 
>> line, polygon, box, circle like objects that can be displayed, created, 
>> edited using OpenLayers vector support, and saved these back to a 
>> postgis database? without the need to install and manage any additional 
>> major applications, like geoserver, featureserver, etc.
> 
> Note that WFS-T doesn't get you this: OpenLayers has no support for
> writing modified data out as WFS-T by default. (Also note that
> FeatureServer has no support for WFS-T, because it's extremely complex
> in comparison to serving data as WFS.) 
> 
> Regards,

Ok, Thanks I have learned something about featureserver and OpenLayers.

The driver is trying to keep client installation simple. The more 
packages and applications that need to be loaded on a webserver makes it 
much harder to sell the installation. If a client is not using python or 
java or tomcat, etc then you need to justify adding any of that into 
their infrastructure. Production sites are pretty locked down.

So, I stand by my use-case with the possible modification that maybe it 
doesn't need to be WFS-T.

What are the other use-cases that people are looking at that started 
this discussion. Maybe we should be looking at them before discussing 
technical solutions.

-Steve W