PHP module

[Stephen Lime]

Go for it. I'm all for multi language support. I chose to use SWIG in conjuction with
a number of helper functions rather than screwing with language specific typemaps.
A bit more work but I think the resulting object interface is pretty clean. Hopefully
that same style can be mimiced with PHP. The helper functions are found in
mapscript.i and probably won't take much modification.

For query support I envision it two ways. $map->query... methods and $layer->query...
methods. In both cases a complex object containing query results will be produced
and will be accessed like cursors in a database. Next, previous and so on. It will
probably be a couple of weeks before it's ready although it's at the top of my list.

Steve 

Stephen Lime
Internet Applications Analyst

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937

>>> Daniel Morissette <danmo at videotron.ca> 01/28/00 09:45AM >>>
Stephen Lime wrote:
> 
> Way back, like 2 and a half years ago. I had that working, but had little audience
> for PHP or the MapServer at the time so I bagged it. Also, it was a lot of work compared
> to using SWIG. I haven't paid close attention to PHP in a while. I know that it's come
> a long way and is extremely popular. I don't suppose adding modules has gotten any
> easier? If something could be put together to mirror MapScript then I would support
> its development. At this point no PHP work exists.
> 

Steve,

I have never implemented PHP modules, but I had a look at that when I
started using PHP about 1 1/2 years ago and it didn't seem to be too bad
(but I may be wrong!?!).  What's interesting here is that the work to
make MapServer intrinsics available through a scripting language has
been mostly done for the MapScript module... so this should facilitate a
lot the implementation of a PHP module.

I think I'm going to jump in and implement at least a rough PHP module
based on what's been done for MapScript... we can then see if it's worth
pushing it further and distributing it with MapServer (hopefully
yes!)... any recommendations before I get into that?

Also, is there any timeframe for implementing support for the ShapeFile
query functions?  We would like to use these from PHP in the app that we
want to build.  I guess in the meantime we can do queries by looping
through objects using ShapefileObj's get() method since the dataset for
our first PHP/MapServer app will be reasonably small... but it would
definitely be great to have optimized query functions.

Thanks,
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette                       danmo at videotron.ca 
              http://pages.infinit.net/danmo/ 
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.