Mapserver <=> ArcIMS comparison

[John Hockaday]

Matt,

I have tried ArcIMS, Mapserv, and MapXtreme.  It took me longer to set
up ArcIMS and Mapxtreme than mapserv on a Solaris 2.6 UNIX platform.
(They may be easier on Windows NT.)  This is because of the
documentation, lack of source code, prerequisite software and different
presentation methods.

The support for mapserv is much better, through this list, than the
forums for ArcIMS and MapXtreme.  (In some most cases I received no
answers from the proprietary software forum sites.)

The documentation for mapserv is very good though sometimes it is
incomplete as it doesn't quite keep up with the newest version.  I
think that the proposed "documentation committee" may fix that a bit.
The documentation for ArcIMS and MapXtreme is OK but if there is a
application problem there seems to be no way of tracking it down via
the documentation.

Both ArcIMS and MapXtreme use Java Servlets.  This should make them
faster to keep track of the sessions and the thread footprint should be
small though I didn't get far enough with these two to test this
theory.  Mapserv uses CGI though I believe that it can be incorporated
into Java Servlets.  I would be very interested to see this
demonstrated somewhere as theoretically it should be faster and less
resource hungry than Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol.

I found that mapserv is very easy to set up an interface.  I just
developed my HTML form to what I wanted the page to look like.  I then
added the CGI post call to mapserv and inserted the mapserv "objects"
such as [map], [img], [mapwidth], [mapheight], [zoom__select], [ref],
[legend], [scalebar] etc. at the appropriate spots in the HTML form.  I
then built the .map file for the interface and it works fine.  The
major problem was converting from the map objects documentation to my
layer requrements.  This was a problem because of the many options in
the map file, the mass of documentation and my trying to get my head
around things.  (This is my comprehension and not the documentation's
fault.)

With ArcIMS and MapXtreme there are some GUI's that allow development
of the interface and equivalent to map files.  If you want to do
something different to the options in the GUI's you will be hard
pressed to do it.  There is some documentation for the ArcIMS XML
files.  There seems to be no other documentation.

MapXtreme doesn't handle Shapfiles very well.  It took over five
minutes to display a Shapfile and only 18 seconds to display the same
information in MapInfo format.  (The message here is convert everything
to MapInfo files.)

I have not delved into mapscript as I find mapserv meets my
requirements.  Someone else will have to comment on that.

I would like to know if there are any companies in Australia who would
contract out to develop mapserv interfaces.  This seems to be a
priority with our organisation even though we have the skills
internally.  (Maybe outsourcing is about to happen.)

Conclusion:
===========

- Mapserv is easier to setup, maintain, and develop.
- Mapserv has better support and documentation.
- I can't comment on the speed comparisions though theoretically ArcIMS
  and MapXtreme should be faster.


I hope that this helps.


Johnh

> From: "Matt.Wilkie" <Matt.Wilkie at gov.yk.ca>
> To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
> Subject: Mapserver <=> ArcIMS comparison
> Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 10:56:08 -0700
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> 
> Does anybody here have experience with both Mapserver and ArcIMS?
> Do you have any comments you'd like to share? What do you think of
> them? Which is better? etc.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> -matt
> ========================================
> Matt Wilkie * GIS Technician * Yukon Renewable Resources GIS
> http://renres.gov.yk.ca/pubs/rrgis/