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

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Chris,

OK, this is a valid suggestion I had not thought of trying to write a 
WFS server as the interface. This seems like a lot of work to do for 
what we want, but I guess it is just a matter of where it is done, ie: 
in mapserver vs in PHP.

So I guess the qustion now is, Does anyone know of a simple WFS server 
in PHP that I can hack the data stores to tie into a a search engine?

Thanks for the suggestion,
   -Steve

christopher.schmidt at nokia.com wrote:
> 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
> 
>