[mapserver-dev] How to create a new layer provider?

[Paul Ramsey]

Does OGR not have simple WFS client support? You could probably bind
your client to your server over that bridge.

P

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Stephen Woodbridge
<woodbri at swoodbridge.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have the possibility of creating a new layer provider for mapserver and
> wanted to bounce some ideas around.
>
> The use case:
>
> Client has a search engine that has some simple spatial capabilities.
> We would like to be able to connect mapserver to the search engine, probably
> via an HTTP GET or POST request with a bounding box, and the search engine
> would return a set of records that mapserver would draw.
>
> The search engine would get an adapter written to format the data as
> required, it can currently export data as JSON and XML. These could probably
> be adapted to some existing standards, for example there is probably not
> reason that we could not format data is WKT or WKB cononical format like
> that used in postGIS.
>
> The opportunity:
>
> I am think that writing some custom interface is not much value to the
> community, but if we wrote a generic mapserver consumer interface that could
> be prototyped up in say PHP or python for the data provider, then this might
> be more interesting and we could then also write the search engine adapter
> to use that same interface.
>
> Before I go too far down this line of thought:
>
> 1) are there other existing interfaces that this could easily be implemented
> through, like OGR?
>
> 2) what would be a good example code that I should look at mimicing a new
> layer provider?
>
> 3) I do not want this to get blown out of scope for what the client needs,
> but I would be interested in ideas on how to make this more generally useful
> to the community if we go forward with it.
>
> 4) I do not think we want to write a search engine adapter that implements
> something as complex as a WFS service.
>
> Assuming this goes forward, I will write an RFC up after I've done some
> research and gotten some feedback.
>
> Thoughts and ideas welcome,
>  -Steve W
>   http://imaptools.com/
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