[Mapserver-users] XML Mapfile

[Daniel Morissette]

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> OK so SLD the same as Web Map Contexts?
> It also sounds like a bunch of this stuff is under active development. 
> How much is ready for prime-time on 4.01 and 4.2?
> Is there documentation for it, sounds like I have a bunch of reading to do.
> 

SLD is all there and stable in 4.2. With respect to docs, I don'

With respect to docs, it's still a draft that will eventually make it 
into the official MapServer docs. This is the topic of a bug:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=625
The draft is there as an attachment to the bug.

> The only technical reason for going a different route is the fact that a 
> lot of our infrastructure is based on mapscript, perl, php, etc. 
> Converting it to work with WMS and SLD "might" be a lot bigger task than 
> writing a mapfile -> XML -> mapfile converter.
> 

I think SLD is the way to go: an SLD can easily be applied to a map 
object inside a MapScript script, so I don't think you would need to 
change your system that much.

The only drawback in your case may be the overhead of processing the 
same SLD for every map request... but then you could just preprocess the 
SLDs into mapfiles and that's still simpler than building a complete 
mapfile -> XML -> mapfile convertor.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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