[mapserver-users] Mapscript alternatives

[Nicolas Boretos]

Sean Gillies wrote:
> 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.

Even more obscure is the TclMapscript interface, which like Perl above, 
allows hooking/combining numerous libraries into your mapping 
application. A very powerfull combination is running 
mapserver/tclmapscript under tclhttpd, a powerfull web application 
server written in tcl.
I believe though, that on WIN, tclmapscript binary is based on MS3.4

regards,

nicolas boretos

> 
> cheers,
> Sean
>