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

[strk]

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 08:33:47PM -0400, Stephen Woodbridge 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.

Yes! This would be very useful to me.

I'm playing with drupal/gis and it looks like to only current path
to expose a WMS using mapserver would be for the drupal part to
expose a WFS and for mapserver to consume it and convert to WMS.

Still viable, but why not feeding geometries directly from PHP
as a provier ? Would be a more direct way, and less things to setup.

--strk; 

  ()   Free GIS & Flash consultant/developer
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