[mapserver-users] re: Mapserver and Zope

[Vic Kelson]

Hi All,

It seems to me that, given the availability of the WMS stuff in 
mapserver, that a wise route toward using mapserver and Zope together 
would be to use Zope to build sites that are WMS clients.  For the 
simplest example, you could use Zope to construct a WMS request to draw 
a map image.  Zope (it's Python, after all) has great XML handling, so 
you could make a Zope application that would request the layer 
descriptions from mapserver WMS, then build a web GUI that allows the 
user to turn layers off/on, etc. For more advanced applications, again, 
use WMS feature requests to grab information from mapserv for processing 
in Zope.

I would envision the development of a set of Zope ZClasses for WMS 
communication with mapserver that handle the gory details of this 
problem.  The ZClasses could hide all the communications, allow for 
decoding of GML, and perhaps provide some rudimentary HTML display 
functionality.

In my view, this strategy for Zope-mapserver integration is MUCH 
preferred over mapscript because:

0) Completely standards based (WMS, GML)
1) No need for Zope and mapserver to be on the same computer
2) No need to use Zope external methods (which can be a pain to debug)
3) No "moving target" as mapscript evolves, the Zope code is stable as 
mapserver evolves
4) Conceptually identical to Zope integration with databases and other 
fun stuff
5) Compatible with ArcIMS as well as mapserver

What to y'all think of this idea?  I'd recommend making a generic Python 
WMS Client library and wrapping it up in Zope.
Vic