[Mapserver-users] Atlas Amsterdam, first week running

[Jan Hartmann]

Hi Folks,

After six days running, I got about 7000 map requests from 360 computers 
and some thirty personal communications from all over the world, which 
is very nice. Thanks! Based on that, I would say that once the 
application gets loaded, it runs without problems. For such a complex 
user interface this is very satisfactory.

The main problem seems getting the thing loaded at all. Some 50 
computers didn't manage to get even the first map loaded (about 20 of 
these from Brazil, I don't know why). There seem to be two reasons for 
this (apart from robots and other undirected visits):

1) The application runs *only* on IE 5.5 and up, and Mozilla 1.3 and up. 
I'm sorry to have forgotten to say this in the announcement. I'll add a 
browser detector, but I don't think it will ever be possible to extend 
this interface to anything else thane W3C compliant browsers.

2) Both slow connections and slow computers seem to timeout on loading. 
I have sped up the graphics and deferred loading as much as possible, so 
now the page should load much faster and hopefully on more sites. It 
remains a complex aplication however, and will allways require much 
network traffic and PC processing power.

If people still encounter problems although they have the right sort of 
platform, computer and connection, I would appreciate if they'd let me know.

In a few weeks I'll make the source code of the user interface 
available. A preliminary version is at:

http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/mum/consess2/hartmann/main.html

This is the basic interface, which has not changed. I added a few 
classes specific for MapServer, e.g. the windows with the zoom buttons. 
With these additions a complete mapping interface, including zoom and 
pan, can be written in a few dozen lines of JavaScript.


Again, thanks a lot!


Jan


dr. J. Hartmann
Department of Geography
University of Amsterdam
email:jhart at frw.uva.nl