[mapserver-dev] ModMapserver?

[Howard Butler]

On Mar 13, 2008, at 4:38 PM, Steve Lime wrote:

> Has anyone ever investigated the what Apache Module support would  
> take? Since fastcgi works reasonably well it might be a
> natural next step.

I remember danmo telling me YAGNI at FOSS4G in Minneapolis.  Part of  
my drive for wanting mod_mapserver was really to replace our homegrown  
crossplatform stuff with APR, which has way more users and devs than  
we do.  Apart from firing up a map draw inside of an Apache process  
and having it promptly explode my server :) (this was before we were  
so diligent with our big ass locking strategy), I didn't take things  
too far.  At the time, MapServer did not support being built as a  
shared object either, IIRC.

What could mod_mapserver give us over just using fastcgi?
- Access to Apache-style configuration (some like and some hate this)
	- URL specification with Location blocks (WMS answers foo/wms and WFS  
answers foo/wfs without rewrite/wrapper script hacks)
	- MapServer "services" could be easily specified to encapsulate stuff  
that people tend to do system-wide now (error log location, GDAL  
variables like GDAL_CACHEMAX)
	- Integration with Apache's error logging
- Access to Apache modules from within MapServer (for fun and twisted  
things)
	- mpm prefork
	- mod_auth and friends
	- mod_proxy/mod_rewrite
	- apr_memcached

I think a mod_mapserver would be a fun project, and it would open up  
MapServer to a lot more "server" stuff.  I think a good place to start  
would be something like the URL/Location specification stuff and maybe  
hooking MapServer up to be able to talk to the mpm API.  You could  
even take it all the way and replace things like msStringToUpper with  
its Apache equivalents and make APR/APR-util a required library of  
MapServer (I highly doubt we've the stomach for it though).

Howard