interested...

[Daniel Morissette]

Hugo Ahlenius wrote:
> 
> I am curious in mapserver, capabilities and potential. I have been working
> in MapObjects w/ VB and feel quite home there, but it is always fun to poke
> with free software, especially if it can do something I couldnt do before.
> 

For having used MapObjects IMS myself in the past, I can tell you at
least one thing that MapServer does better than MoIMS (and that has
frustrated me a lot!): 

With MapServer, the map slides are guaranteed to contain the RGB colors
that you ask for, unless you ask for more than 256 colors which is the
limit for GIFs.  I don't know if you ever noticed, but the colors that
MoIMS gives you come from a fixed palet that will change depending on
which applications are running on WinNT server at the time you start up
MoIMS... pretty good Eh!?!?  Probably something to do with the fact that
they use the Windows rendering services.  (Without mentioning the fact
that you are stuck with JPEG output only unless you pay the Unisys
royality)

Another point is that as far as I remember MoIMS works the good old CGI
way, that means that you need one "print" statement for every line of
HTML you want to generate.  Being allowed to work with HTML templates
would simplify your MoIMS script a lot.  I had solved that myself by
writing a COM object that did manipulations on an HTML template, and
with one single call I could replace a portion of a page with the output
from a VB object.  This worked very well together with MoIMS and I could
make a copy available if you decide to stick with MoIMS.

> Here is what I have done;
>     http://128.39.148.64/
> 
> This map service uses 24-bit TIFF for the raster data. The legend is NOT
> created dynamically (would be attractive). Another nice feature is that it
> shows different degrees of generalization in comparison to zoom level.
> 
> Can I do the same thing with mapserver?
> 

Except for the fact that MapServer currently accepts only 8 bit Tiffs at
this point, I would think that you should be able to do that.  I have to
admit that for advanced GIS analysis MoIMS is probably stronger than
MapServer, but MapServer does everything you need for simple thematic
mapping and navigation.  For my part I have switched to MapServer
completely and don't see a need to go back to MoIMS!

If you're used to scripting your application, you might want to look at
MapScript that gives you much more flexibility than the regular
MapServer (mapserv.exe).  Not sure if the Perl version works on NT yet,
but we have a PHP version that works great on NT, see:
    http://www2.dmsolutions.on.ca/mapserver/php_mapscript_faq.html

(FYI, PHP is a bit like Microsoft's .ASP pages and allows you to embed
script in an HTML template)

OOpps... I was about to forget one more advantage: MapServer is very
light.  The following demo runs with the PHP MapScript on a Pentium-120
with Linux that's sitting in a corner of our office:
    http://www2.dmsolutions.on.ca/gmap/gmap75.phtml
That machine could hardly run WinNT as a workstation!!!

Anyways... just my $0.02!
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 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.