[mapserver-users] PHP Vs. Cold Fusion...

[Puneet Kishor]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2002, at 12:04  PM, Jessica Anderson wrote:

> Correct me if I am wrong but cold fusion cannot create shape files on 
> the
> fly like php.


No Jessica,

Not in the way PHP can with Mapscript. CF has no hooks into Mapscript as 
of yet. Just like the good folks at DM Solutions wrote the glue between 
PHP and Mapserver via the PHP/Mapscript module, someone has to write a 
CF/Mapscript module. As of now, CF has no way to munge data via 
Mapscript.

However, all these methods (Perl, PHP, etc.) in the end use some other 
program (for example, shapelib) to actually create the shape files. With 
that concept in mind, we (a colleague of mine at my company and myself) 
created a CFX tag that would create a shape. We did this a while back 
when we had to figure out a way to allow users to create simple polygons 
using ArcIMS. We used a Java applet to actually draw the polygons on a 
backdrop of a map, then I took the coordinate stream from the Java 
applet and cleaned it up using CF, then I used the CFX written by my 
colleague Steve Allenstein using shapelib to have CF convert that 
coordinate stream into a shapefile containing just that one shape, then 
we had a batch file called using CFEXECUTE that would insert the newly 
created shapefile into the master shapefiles held in ArcSDE, and then 
displayed back in ArcIMS. What a ringa-ringa-roses, but it actually 
worked very well and the client was satisfied. Of course, all this 
nonsense would be made much simpler if there were a CF/Mapscript module.

Any takers for a new Mapserver sub-project? I don't have the C/C++ 
sharps (so to say), but I can provide all of my CF expertise to the 
extent needed. CF has a well documented API and allows creation of 
custom tags and modules using C++ or Delphi very well.

Hope this answers your question. I am cc-ing this email to the Mapserver 
list as there is bound to be some interest in this somewhere.

pk/