future directions for mapserver

[Michael Kleih]

Marc Jacquin wrote:

> Ok,
>
> I didn't want to make it public before some of our customers see that as prime time. But here is what can be done with MapServer and a lot of midnight oil. As usual I cannot release this stuff for free. We must decide what can be given back to the community.
>
> Basically, the raster is JPEG (tricked with some gd improvements) and the green lines are roads built with very simple map files. The rest is proprietary. It has some features like quad-tree indexing ... very useful for snapping .. No doc, no help, just prototype.
>
> It issues the big question : where is the standard to transfer vector data from server to client ? XML ? GML (not really appropriate).
>

I suggest you to use OpenGIS WMS as I am using in my client:

http://opengis.jrc.it

Between my servers and my client I don't actually transfer vector-
data, but using MapServer, I convert it to GIF images. In that
way the transfer gets much faster. The OpenGIS WMS protocol
as it is implemented in most prototypes until now does it
like that, but it also forsees to actually transferring vector
data. To get more information about WMS look here:

http://www.opengis.org/techno/specs/00-028.pdf

Michael