[Mapserver-users] mapscript vs mapsever

[Sean Gillies]

On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 08:04  AM, Espen Isaksen wrote:

> Ok, the answer is kind of what I expected. I guess I should rephrase my
> question. Why would I want to use Mapscript? Which benefits does it 
> give
> me? Simply better control?
>
> Espen Isaksen
> Norway
>

What do you gain?  You gain the ability to merge the functionality of
MapServer with the functionality of other programming packages using
your favorite interpreted language.  Say, for example, you want to do
extra image processing such as adaptive contrast enhancement on your
map imagery.  Use MapServer and Perl's Imagemagick or Python's Imaging
library together in an application.  Maybe you want to use your favorite
page templating system rather than MapServer's built-in templating.
This is possible with MapScript.  There are many other possibilities
that you will probably read about in this thread.

The downside is that MapScript is only a subset (though a large subset)
of MapServer's full capabilities, and that you will have to write code
from scratch to implement things which are available "out of the box"
with MapServer.  However, since development in PHP, Perl, and especially
Python is quicker than development in C, this is not so bad.

It's not so much about better control over the maps, it's about greater
possibilities in map server applications.

cheers,
Sean


--
Sean Gillies
sgillies at frii dot com
http://www.frii.com/~sgillies