[mapserver-users] Poll: Do you think a standalone Mapfile editing tool is necessary?

[Paolo Cavallini]

Jeff McKenna ha scritto:
> On 23-Jul-08, at 5:03 AM, enri wrote:

>> I am planning to develop a stand-alone Mapfile editing tool for
>> mapserver based map authoring by a way of WYSWYG, including symbol
>> editing, because I find it's so difficult to use a text editor
>> authoring a mapfile to render beautiful map. But I am not sure if it's
>> usefule for you, or someone else has already done that.
>>
>> If you think that would be useful, please give me a vote and that will
>> encourage me to contribute faster to the community. But if you find I
>> am repeating others work, be kindly tell me please.
...
> I can tell you that Quantum GIS' ability to style layers in a desktop
> environment and export the layers as a mapfile is quite nice.  And there
> is also a mapfile editor named Mapstorer that runs on a database backend.
> 
> But it is a huge task to maintain such a project, as MapServer is
> constantly changing and other technologies change (see MapLab).  That
> said, yes we'd all love the perfect tool :)

I think you really need a proper GIS to preview whether your mapfile
returns what you need, so I think the qgis approach is a winning one.
Please note that the current approach is light and fast, as it is based
on a standalone tool in python (so easy to maintain and change as
mapfile syntax changes) who takes a qgis project and converts it in a
mapfile.
I think in the long term a nicer approach would be to use a standard
description for both qgis and mapserver (possibly other projects also),
with additional tags used for desktop gis and invisible to mapserver, so
no conversions would be necessary. SLD might be a good approach in this
sense.
All the best.
pc
-- 
Paolo Cavallini, see: * http://www.faunalia.it/pc *