New to MapServer, project planning advice sought

[alex zendel]

Hello all,

I'm a GIS professional whose experience, until now, has been mostly limited to ESRI, Windows, VB, ArcIMS, and ArcObjects.  But I'm looking forward to make the transition to open-source solutions and internet programming.  So when the American Whitewater Affiliation (AW) (www.americanwhitewater.org) asked me to provide some volunteer help with their 'River Explorer' (http://207.246.70.46/demo/) MapServer app, I gladly accepted.

I have some other projects to wrap up before I can focus most of my attention on this project, so I have some time to do some brainstorming and planning I'm hoping that you can help here.  I have dabbled with MapServer via MapTools.org's suite of tools (Thanks DMSolutions!).  We're eventually going to want to customize the interface to, for example, search/display river stretches by difficulty (class II to class V), what's currently running (live stream flow data is already being stored in AW's database), zipcode, etc.  So what programming language do you recommend to interface with MapScript?  I'm leaning towards PHP so we can ultimately keep the application platform independent.  Plus, AW already uses php in the non-GIS part of their website.

If php is the way to go, what IDE/editors do you recommend?  I'l also need to get myself up to speed on php in general.  Any good php books that you recommend?

Once available, I plan on purchasing the 'MapServer' Book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590594908/qid=1113146902/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-9643286-3305410).  The description says that this book will include demo applications.  What language does the book use in these demos?  php?

Using USGS WMS layers.  We hope to include several WMS layer in our app so we don't have to acquire/maintain/serve big datasets such as local level roads, streams, hillshade, etc.  How feasible is doing so?  What type of performance can be expected?

Thanks for all of your input

Alex


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