GEOS and Mapserver

[Godwin, Elizabeth]

I've cross-posted this to various lists, so I'm sorry to those who are
getting duplicates.
 
I'd like to beef up my Mapserver applications with some geoprocessing
functionality - buffers at present, other functions will follow.  For
now I am playing with PostGIS and having great sucess, IF my features
are all stored in the database.
 
What I'd like to be able to do though, is take a feature from WMS
getFeatureInfo or WFS and be able to buffer that.  As a test of this, I
took the GML from a getFeatureInfo request and parsed it manually to be
a WKT string.  Then used PostGIS to run the buffer.  Apart from slight
precision differences, it appeared to be close to what PostGIS would
have done with it's own feature (the WMS request was done against the
same feature through MapServer).  
 
Now that I confirmed this is all possible, what I am missing is that I'd
like to be able to 
a.. do the conversion from GML to WKT with some script/library
b.. do this with a GML stream
c.. ultimately do this without PostGIS database dependancy.
 
I figure that GEOS can do the geometry format conversions, is this
right?
Has anyone written a library for linux/windows that will let me talk to
it with PHP?
 
I'm prodding these lists in hopes of finding out what else is going on
out there in this area. It would be fabulous if this was all built into
Mapserver, but from what I can tell, it's just a thought right now. 
 
Thanks!!
 
Liz Godwin
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