Administration Tools

[cshorte2 at csc.com]

> One of the biggest missing pieces with MapServer are application
> administration tools- mapfile, symbol set and web authoring. Anybody
> out there interested in working on something like this? I'm thinking
> Tk/Tcl, java or whatever. Could even be converters that would let
> you build things in existing desktop systems (eg. mapinfo or arcview)
> and write MapServer config files. I'm swamped with 3.3 work but could
> help on admin stuff a little. Please let me know if you're interested and
> we can persue forming a working group or something.

Count me in.  As mentioned before, I want to be able to add/modify/delete
elements to/from shapefiles from a web front end.

The web front end can be written in either javascript or java.

There is already the makings of server code to add an element, but none
to modify or delete, which will require restructuring on the database
somehow.  Ie, if you want to extent a road so that it has more points,
then the size of the road element will increase, which means that it
will not fit into the previous road element size in the .shp file.

Should we:
1. Completely rebuild the .shp file?
2. Add the new element to the end of the .shp file, and just change the
index to the .shp file.  This will lead to a situations where the index
file will be in a different order to the shape file:

.shx -> .shp
1 -> 1
2 -> 2
3 -> 5
4 -> 4
5 -> null

>From reading the ERSI shapefile spec it seems that this isn't allowed.

3. Something else.

Cameron Shorter.