[mapserver-users] getting rid of GD and dependencies

[Alex Rice]

I have this crazy idea to take the Mapserver code base and rip out all 
the GD/libJPEG/libPNG/etc. code and rewrite the graphics routines to use 
Cocoa's AppKit rendering on Mac OS X. Cocoa is Apple's Objective-C 
framework, formerly called OpenStep. The advantages of this that I can 
see:

1) It would remove most or all of the difficult compile and dependency 
problems that mapserver has on OS X. It might be necessary to wrap 
mapserver in an Objective-C application, or a loadable bundle, but that 
won't present a problem.

2) I suspect it would look a whole lot better. Cocoa has a 
Postscript-like imaging model and uses PDF, antialiasing and vector 
graphics. No jaggies! Just nice smooth images. Appkit also has a lot of 
neat features for compositing images with both raster and vector 
content. And Unicode support. It's just a really neat graphics 
environment through and through.

3) Whatever work I did could theoretically, eventually be ported to 
GNUStep, and thus run on any other Unix platform. 
(http://www.gnustep.org). Although I hear that currently the GnuStep 
Appkit stuff still needs a lot of refinement.

So mainly I just want to bounce this idea off you all...

-- Would anyone take offense if I did this to the mapserver source code?

-- Is there anyone on the list who knows Objective-C and Appkit 
programming?

-- Good idea? Crazy idea?

-- The license to mapserver looks very um, flexible. Are there any 
commercial products based on it? I don't know if this project I am 
describing would be open-source or not, I haven't talked with my 
employer about legal shtuff yet. I would push it to be open-source 
though.

Thanks in advance,

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alex_rice at arc.to
alrice at swcp.com