Displaying dynamic pushpins

[Alex Wells]

Hi Ken

Thanks a lot for your advice - Storing the points in a DB definitely sounds
the way to go - it is more secure, and you can differentiate different web
users with different sets of GPS coordinates, which is definitely something
we need to do.  We will be receiving GPS coordinates from either an SMS
gateway or GPRS, so we will be putting them into a DB anyway.  I'll take a
looky at that postgresql/postGIS package!  It could also be a good way to
get a 'time window' of coordinates for a GPS device, in order to build up
snail trails.

Cheers
Alex Wells
(Malta, EU)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Lord" <kenlord at GMAIL.COM>
To: <MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 10:46 PM
Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Displaying dynamic pushpins


> Hi Alex,
>
> I have not yet implemented it, but I have plans to do something
> similar to what you are doing.  You may not want to tackle it the way
> we will be, but maybe it will give you some ideas.
>
> In my case, I will be creating the points by using an ASP webpage to
> write the new points to a PostGIS database table that will be
> displayed by mapserver, using the new windows friendly
> postgresql/postGIS package.
>
> The mapserver webpage (actually within a flash interface in our case)
> will have a form to submit the data to the ASP page in the background
> to add the point and its attributes.
>
> In our case the user will either type in the coordinates or click a
> tool on the map, one point at a time.
>
> In your case I would assume that you'd have some type of text file
> from your GPS that you would tell the ASP page to parse through to add
> the records.
>
> I'm sure all those PHP / Linux guys out there have their analogous way
> to do this if you prefer to lean that way.
>
> Cheers,
> Ken Lord
> Vancouver BC
>
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 21:13:42 +0100, Alex Wells <ad_wells at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hello all.
>>
>> I am just getting started with Mapserver and I am a beginner in this sort
>> of
>> thing.  I am not sure about the best way to go about displaying waypoints
>> and dynamic pushpins on my map.  I have installed Mapserver on Apache on
>> Windows XP, and already got a map together.  I want to bring in GPS
>> coordinates from remote devices and display them together on the map.
>>
>> Maybe the shapelib libraries are the way to go? i.e. convert coordinates
>> into point shapefiles 'on the fly'?
>>
>> Your wisdom would be greatly appreciated!
>>
>> Thanks a lot in advance!
>> Alex
>