[Mapserver-users] What doesn't MapServer do?

[ANDY CANFIELD]

Yes, I have no problem doing that. I need to clean it up first though. Also 
there are three things with it that may not bode well for public consumption 
of it because it was very specific to the process it was created to be used 
in.

1.) It is Windows specific because it reads the fields it needs to use in 
the shape file from an Ini using GetPrivateProfileString, and it finds the 
location of the Ini using GetModuleFileName. I don't know what the 
Unix/Linux equivalent for these are. My Unix/Linux C knowlege is very weak 
for the OS API calls. Someone else would have to add this as I have no way 
of testing it even if I do add the appropriate calls with an #ifdef WIN32 
type setup.

2.) Currently it loops through the whole shape file in a full read looking 
for matches. Because I am only using a few counties worth of GDT data this 
works very well. If you were going to use a huge gdt street base such as the 
whole US the shapefile really needs to be read into a balanced b-search-tree 
to speed up the lookup to acceptable performance levels on such a large data 
set. After the clean up this will be the next thing going into it as I need 
to do this for myself too as the area this app serves is getting to a point 
where this will soon become a must.

3.) Again for larger areas than I am dealing with you would want to add 
city, state, and zip code  filtering logic to it. Where as for the area this 
serves I need to see all results in all areas regardless of city, state, and 
zip. Again not hard to add, the function could simply have an overloaded 
version added that takes these arguments rather than just an address.

If given those things, people are still interested then I will clean it up 
and add the b-tree stuff and then put the source out where everyone can get 
to it and kick it around a bit.


>From: "David Bitner" <bitner at macnoise.com>
>To: "ANDY CANFIELD" <andy_canfield at hotmail.com>, <woodbri at swoodbridge.com>
>CC: <mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu>
>Subject: RE: [Mapserver-users] What doesn't MapServer do?
>Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:32:22 -0500
>
>
>
>Would you be willing to share your geocoding add-in?
>
> >Geocoding was the only web mapping thing I needed at first in my app to 
>do
> >that Mapserver didn't do natively. I simply wrote an add-in for php in C
> >that does the geocoding part. So when I load the php_mapscript .dll I 
>also
> >load my goecoding engine .dll. It ended up working very well. It uses GDT
> >data from shapefiles, it wouldn't take much to scale it to use a MySql
> >backend as an alternative to shapefiles. So far for me adding php
>extensions
> >in C to tack on the extra functionality seems to run much quicker than 
>when
> >I wrote the same thing directly in php. So every add-on since then I have
> >done as a php extension .dll in C.
>
>
>
>
>

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