[mapserver-dev] ModMapserver?

[Steve Lime]

Is this something you're interested in pursuing with or without funding? Perhaps this
is another Summer of Code possibility?

Steve

>>> On 3/13/2008 at 6:26 PM, in message
<EFDB9343-F039-4F18-9BA9-0B88DD7311E7 at gmail.com>, Howard Butler
<hobu.inc at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 	 
>