[mapserver-dev] pre-RFC - Add an HTTP request data provider to mapserver

christopher.schmidt at nokia.com christopher.schmidt at nokia.com
Wed Jul 28 16:24:37 EDT 2010


On Jul 27, 2010, at 4:13 PM, ext Stephen Woodbridge wrote:

> Hi Mapserver Devs,
> 
> I am interested in getting input and interest in doing some possibly or 
> partially funded development of the following.
> 
> USE CASE:
> 
> User has spatial data stored in a proprietary system, database, search 
> engine, whatever. They want to pull that data into mapserver for 
> rendering, querying, etc like any other data layer. They can access that 
> data via PHP and possibly other tools. They would like to have a generic 
> HTTP data provider LAYER added to mapserver where mapserver would make 
> URL requests based on some defined template URL and the URL would return 
> data in some  well know format like GeoJSON, GPX, KML, others.
> 
> The LAYER definition would look something like:
> 
> LAYER
>   NAME "mylines"
>   CONNECTIONTYPE HTTP
>   CONNECTIONFORMAT GEOJSON|GPX|KML|...
>   DATA "http://localhost/mydata.php"
>   TYPE LINE
>   ...
> END

Are you intentionally recreating MapServer's WFS Client support?

http://mapserver.org/ogc/wfs_client.html

If you are saying you can write your own PHP (which I think you're
saying), and you want a service that would return features over the
web... wouldn't you just use WFS?

If the problem is that you don't want to write out GML, then extending
the WFS client support to support multiple formats through OGR seems
the way to go, but I don't understand why you're suggesting creating
*another* protocol for transferring features over the web.

-- Chris




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