MapServer vs. Deegree

[Craig Miller]

Why is everyone bashing on this guy?  IMHO he asked a pretty good question
for someone new to the OSS mapping community and MapServer in particular.

C is a fast language, but it has been known to be susceptible to buffer
overflows which when exposed as a service on the internet is generally a bad
thing.  In the case of Map Server, I've never heard of any vulnerabilities,
but it is something that a newcomer should be concerned with and evaluate.

CGI has also been shown to not scale well for a couple of reasons.  It
creates a new process for each request, and it doesn't re-use memory
allocations.  In the case of MapServer these concerns are largely moot
because they aren't significant relative to the time and resources it takes
to load data and render a map.  Pooling of PostGIS connections, etc would be
a performance improvement however.

He asked the right questions and has as much right as the rest of us to get
good answers from the community.

--Craig


-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Brent Wood
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 11:46 AM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] MapServer vs. Deegree

On 8/12/05, Nuttall Edward W <EWNUTTALL at qinetiq.com> wrote:

> Is there any reason why I should choose MapServer over Deegree? It seems
to
> based on legacy technologies (C, CGI) yet most of the recent GIS
development
> books around seem to use it in their examples?
> 
> Edward, 

Hmmm.. A terminology issue here? Is legacy necessarily perceived as bad?

Try proven, accepted, wide user base, lots of support, tutorials,
documentation
instead :-)

If C is a legacy language, should we be discarding Linux, and all those
numerical Fortran 77 libraries must no longer be useful. All those RDBMS
systems gone as well? & GRASS must be well past its use by date!

Any software as widely used as Mapserver, proven stable & successful over
years
is probably not going to make the best use of the latest technologies.

Is your priority to have tools based on new technologies or proven
effective,
stable solutions? Which is not to say that newer solutions may be as stable
&
even better than some older ones. Just that legacy is not all bad :-)

For some info on the C vs Java Open Source GIS toolsets, Paul Ramsey's paper
at
http://www.refractions.net/white_papers/ (choose view the pdf) is a useful
resource.


Cheers,

  Brent