[mapserver-users] FW: Need direction for enhancing Mapserver

[Dan_Stevens at stricom.army.mil]

To all,
     I am the technical lead for the program Chan is interning under.  This
is a government program developing a repository for users to "compose"
environmental scenarios from canned database (one degree square) terrain
"tiles".   There are three major objectives to Chan's project:
   Help her to develop hands on experience with all the elements of the
   environmental software we develop
   Provide her with a very practical software development project to grow
   her skills
   Save taxpayer (most of us : ) money
     Chan has already made tremendous progress and has met all of the
program's basic requirements.  Her repository software is running in a
"text only" mode and functions as expected.  She has exceeded expectations
on the GUI side, and can already use the mapserver to query her world map
to get the coordinates for a requested area, but the user must manually
enter the text lat/long to actually retrieve the data, a process that is
both "user unfriendly" and error prone.    Chan is only dedicated to this
effort for another 4 or 5 months in her training track, and the only thing
lacking is being able to compile and link the back-end C++ software Chan
mentioned with the GUI interface providing the several functions Chan
describes below (apparently already supported by mapserver).    Any help
would be appreciated.  Is there anyone who could support a half-hour
telecon to talk through the functions she needs supported  and help us
determine a best  approach to complete the project?

                                                        Thanks
                                                        Dan Stevens

----- Forwarded by Dan Stevens/E_DIR/STRIORL/US on 08/09/01 05:37 AM -----
                                                                                                                   
                    "Chan B.                                                                                       
                    Huynh"               To:     <dan_stevens at stricom.army.mil>                                    
                    <chuynh at ideor        cc:                                                                       
                    lando.org>           Subject:     FW: Need direction for enhancing Mapserver                   
                                                                                                                   
                    08/08/01                                                                                       
                    06:25 PM                                                                                       
                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                                   




Dan,
I forward you here what I send to the mapserver reflector.
Just thought you might want to know what I have in mind.
-chan

-----Original Message-----
From: Chan B. Huynh [mailto:chuynh at ideorlando.org]
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 8:36 PM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: Need direction for enhancing Mapserver


Hi everyone,
First, I'd like to thank all the ones who have helped me with all my puzzle
the past weeks. I now have the digital map of world up and running
beautifully on my NT server with my own source .  I will need a kind soul
to
direct me enhancing Mapserver to do the following:

The interface would be very much like the MapServer Applications: MODIS
Download Facility written by TerraSIP and UMN in the gallery link on
mapserver webpage. Instead of only the Great Lakes area, I need to have a
DGM world map like the Australian worldmap in the gallery.  Besides all the
zoom-in/zoom-out/pan east-west-north-south-ne-nw-se=sw function, the
end-user can draw a rectangular-area/drag-a-box on the window map.  The
mapserver will grab that coordinate of the lower-left and upper-right
corner
of the selected area and convert that to lat/long.  Once I have this
lat/long, it will be fed into my already-written C++ program which produce
a
"peffile" in ASCII format (readable by notepad/wordpad) responsive to user
selected area and avaliable for download from the webbrowser.

Now, having said that, does mapserver support all that I want to do?  If
not, what is the best way I can tackle this?  Is it worth of my time to
re-compile mapserver, play with it and see what I can do with it and add my
part into it?

All suggestions and hints are appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-chan