[mapserver-users] ArcIMS Emulations

[Paul Ramsey]

Brian Fischer wrote:
> 
> 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?

Hmmm, that's two people now asking for PHP. I was going to do a re-write
before moving onwards, to make the code cleaner. I will investigate PHP
a bit, and see how good the XML handling is. Don't you people realize
that Perl is God, and God is Perl?

> 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?

Pretty hard to convince them that they chose the wrong darn format :)
There is a Mr.SID SDK and the LizardTech site says they welcome people
adding SID format to their viewers for free. So even though it's a
patented format, it could be added royalty free. Good coding project for
someone (not me! :).

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     | Paul Ramsey
     | Refractions Research
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