[mapserver-users] Mapscript alternatives

[Sean Gillies]

Adam,

PHP is the best supported flavor of mapscript, but will be
the more limiting.  It may very well provide everything
you need.

Perl mapscript is less well supported than PHP, but more
powerful.  It gives you the option of hooking up many other
great modules to your mapscript apps.  Perl is not going to
be very easy to learn for someone with no C experience,
and there is also the issue of a major Perl language revision
on the horizon.

Python mapscript is even less well supported than Perl.  Only
sketchy documentation (my fault as much as anyone's).  It is
much more easy to learn than Perl and also allows you to
exploit many useful packages.  For my recent employer, I wrote
a Python mapscript app that used the Python Imaging Library
to combine raster layers and apply custom image enhancements
on-the-fly.  I could have done this with Perl, perhaps, but
not with PHP.

cheers,
Sean

Ryan, Adam wrote:

>
> Greetings.
>
> I use a pre-compiled Win32 binary of mapserver and I've got a pretty
> good handle on the CGI portion, mapserv.  I figured out HTML and
> javascript, but I feel limited and want to jump into Mapscript.
> However, prior to using mapserver I'd never even heard of perl, python
> or PHP, nor have I done any C compiling.
>
> My question is:  What are the pros/cons of each?  How hard is it to get
> started (from scratch) in these things?  Is one more powerful than
> another?  How?
>
> Any suggestions or links would be great.  Thanks for your time.
>
> Adam
> Linn County
>
--
Sean Gillies
sgillies at frii.com