[mapserver-users] ArcIMS Emulations

[Brian Fischer]

Paul,

Wow, it works great and it is blazin fast.  It works just like you are
connecting to Geography Network.  This adds a big selling point to
Mapserver.  It is hard sometimes to convince clients that MapServer is
the better choice over other IMS's.  This was one of the sticking points
that clients would bring up.  This is great news.  Would there be any
limitations to what OS this script could run on?  I run MapServer on
Windows.  I know Perl is not the popular choice of MapServer/MapScript
users that use Windows.  Is a port to PHP possible?

Another thing I commonly run into is clients that store all their
imagery in Mr. Sid format.  I know there has been some discussion in the
past about the possibility of adding Mr. SID support to MapServer and
the conclusion was it would not be that easy to do.  Has anyone else
found a creative solution to convincing clients that have imagery stored
in Mr. SID to use MapServer over another IMS that supports Mr. SID
imagery?

Great work Paul.

Have a good day,
Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Ramsey [mailto:pramsey at refractions.net] 
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 4:35 PM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [mapserver-users] ArcIMS Emulations

Hey, all you people with Arc8. Open up ArcCatalog, go to 'Create
connection to internet server...' and enter
'http://mapserver.refractions.net' into the URL box. Then drag one of
the services into ArcMap. Voila! What is the big deal? That ain't no
ArcIMS server on that machine: it is Mapserver, with a perl front-end to
make it act like ArcIMS. 

This is dependant on some hacks I've put into my version of Mapserver.
It also is missing support for some of the ESRI 'standard' projection
ids. When the projection stuff is standard in proj4 (Frank is looking at
it) and I have got my hacks cleanly into mapserver/mapscript I'll
release the script. Maybe by then it will also do client preferences for
rendering too... oooooh... (and have more elegant XML handling...)

-- 
      __
     /
     | Paul Ramsey
     | Refractions Research
     | Email: pramsey at refractions.net
     | Phone: (250) 885-0632
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