New to MapServer, project planning advice sought

[Bart van den Eijnden]

Hi Alex,

I think PHP/Mapscript is quite widely used, so there will be active
support for it. Since the rest of the application is already using PHP, it
seems like the way to go for your application.

I have used the Zend IDE for PHP, but end up usually working in a text
editor. I can recommend the PHP Cookbook by O'Reilly.

I had not seen that Mapserver book yet, it is to be published in June 2005
I see. There is also gonna be an O'Reilly book on Mapserver and Open
Source GIS in general, written by Tyler Mitchell, which will include
Mapscript examples in Python, Perl, PHP and Java.

An excellent resource for PHP/Mapscript will be downloading Chameleon from
DM Solutions, you can download that from maptools.org. Will provide you
with lots and lots of PHP/Mapscript examples in their code.

WMS performs okay, especially if most of your data is coming from the same
service. If you are gonna combine several services, except a noticeable
drop in performance, but it is still doable for sure.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Bart

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 08:57:57 -0700, alex zendel <msestudiente at YAHOO.COM>
wrote:

> 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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