was a larger discussion about mapserver development

[Stephen Lime]

It is reasonable to switch image/graphics libraries. Problem is there aren't many
alternatives. Again, if anyone has other information please let me know.

Any readable format isn't real useful for live applications. One could easily
extend the mapserver to read Arc generate files natively, but the cost would
be used. ASCII files are much slower to read than binary and contain no indexes
so the whole file must be processed rather than bits and pieces. 

Steve

>>> Nathan Carr <ncarr at guideguide.com> 09/29 1:19 PM >>>
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