[mapserver-dev] ModMapserver?

[Howard Butler]

I think a SoC student might be able to get a demo going, but there's a  
lot of moving parts.  If the student was fresh to both APR and  
MapServer, it would be quite a challenge, however.

It would be too much for me to do without funding -- my external uses  
alone of it wouldn't be able to justify the effort.

Maybe some of those strong dollar CDNians are interested :)

Howard

On Mar 14, 2008, at 10:21 AM, Steve Lime wrote:

> 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
>> 	
>>
>