[Mapserver-users] Some General Questions about Mapserver

[Ken Sanderson]

Hello. I have been working with ArcIMS the last couple years and for an
upcomming project that makes heavy use of WMS I wanted to look at
Mapserver and see the pro's and con's of using it instead as it seems to
have a better integration with WMS and similar technologies.

I have spent a bunch of hours going through links in the gallery,
playing with the many great sites I have found there, and have still a
few outstanding questions about functionality. I don't need super detail
on how I go about any of this, I am more intersted in the 'yes it is
possible, yea its possible but painful, no its not possible' type of
responses:

1) Can you zoom to a specific layer? If so can you further zoom to
selected records of a layer?
2) I assume that clicking on the map, or moving mouse over, and
returning a xy map coordinate is possible generically and not just with
java?
3) Are you able to buffer features?
4) When you are doing an identify, is it just a drill-down identify that
returns information on all layers, or can you specify a specific layer?
I assume both, but don't recall seeing the option to specify.
5) I seen a couple examples of selecting multiple features by dragging a
box over an area, in all cases it was with a java enhanced site. Is this
only possible using java, if so why? What is the java doing? Does WMS
natively support this type of feature request?
6) One of the big parts of the project is to query a database, return
coords and put it on a map. From what I have seen this seems feasible,
however can you also project these points on the fly? My points are in
Lat/Long coords, my maps in UTM, I 'could' run each point through a
javascript routine I have that will convert each point one at a time,
but I would rather project the whole thing at once as a 'layer'.
7) Any other general comments on differences between ArcIMS and
Mapserver? 

Thanks,

Ken
Miistakis