[mapserver-dev] Canvas support for MapServer

[Paul Spencer]

Jan,

Canvas is not an output format or rendering technology in any sense  
that MapServer could use it, so I don't believe it can be applied to  
MapServer.

Canvas and excanvas have been used in a few places to render vector  
features at the client and to implement interactive vector digitizing  
and editing (OpenLayers is probably the largest implementation of  
Canvas but eschews excanvas in favour of directly rendering to SVG and  
VML where supported by the browser) but this has nothing to MapServer  
(except possibly to use it as a WFS server to generate the features).

Cheers

Paul

On 26-Jan-09, at 6:17 AM, Jan Hartmann wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> A few weeks ago I suggested in a thread about PDF support that  
> Mapserver could perhaps be made to support the new "Canvas" tag.  
> There were no reactions to this, so I don't know if this suggestion  
> is viable/advisable/practicable, or just downright stupid. Can  
> anyone comment?
>
> (from http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapserver-dev/2009-January/008055.html)
>
>> I am wondering if MapServer support for the "Canvas" tag could do  
>> what Steve suggests in a more simple way. Originally, only Safari,  
>> Opera and Firefox supported this tag to allow (simple) 2D drawing,  
>> but recently a surprisingly simple Javascript interface for IE has  
>> become available, translating Canvas command to native IE VRML  
>> commands. It requires just one single script tag in the web page.
>>
>> See the tutorial at the Mozilla site at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial
>> and the IE interface (from the Google stables) at: http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/
>>
>> This is something I have long been looking for. The graphics are  
>> very simple, so the functionality is nothing like PDF or SVG, but I  
>> could imagine that a driver for MapServer could fulfill many needs.  
>> I can use it already by letting Mapserver generate raw coordinates  
>> and catching them with some sort of Ajax, but a separate driver  
>> would be very neat of course.
>>
>> How about it?
>>
>> Jan
>>
>>
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__________________________________________

    Paul Spencer
    Chief Technology Officer
    DM Solutions Group Inc
    http://research.dmsolutions.ca/