was a larger discussion about mapserver development

[Nathan Carr]

Stephen Lime wrote:

> I've looked for alternatives to GD and haven't found much. Actually ImageMagick has GD-like 
> functions but the price is steep as the author reports 4x speed decrease. Perhaps this is an area 
> you could contribute, sound like you must have solved the problem. Again, speed is critical.

I suppose this rules out GTK then.
Is it plausible to have swichable image libraries?

> Supporting every format under the sun is real low on my priority list. It's not like conversions
> to shapefiles are hard any more so I've no problem with using that format. I'm more interested in
> generic access to distributed spatial data. OGDI (www.ogdi.org) really peaks my interest here. 

This makes feel a bit thick as I'm trying to ungenerate arc/info
coverages into shapefiles using
the gen2shp and the shpfile library. But without the arc/info GIS, and
thus without 'ungenerate'.

Ahh I see this OGDI Base Adapter accesses arc/info native coverages,
will look at this

The other alternative being a EU transport format called GDF, which
although readable looks a bit
daunting to parse.

> Non-standard spatial data access via a scripting environment like perl is also high on my 
> list. 3.3 will introduce MapScript a perl module for creating maps using the MapServer API.

This would be my preferred interface. 
With my rather limited data so far, the mapserver code interface is
looking great.

> > Geographic Information Center
> > California State University, Chico
> 
> Steve

-- 
Nathan Carr  ncarr at guideguide.com