[mapserver-users] enhancement ideas

[Tamas Szekeres]

2008/3/6, Joan Verdaguer <verdaguerj at yahoo.es>:
> I already have readen MS-RFC-22a and think it is a very flexible and
> powerful enhancement to Mapserver since adds transforming abilities. It can
> be seen analogous to applying XSLT to XML: is the next step towards
> flexibility. IMHO, it is really a pity that it is not getting enough
> support.
> That being said, I still see the need of a global built-in expression
> mechanism. In the case of writing plugins to transform features, still
> exists the need of evaluating generic expressions in these plugins: it would
> be a pain to write a specific transformers for every specific style or
> attribute transformation.
> Moreover, I still see the need to get values from the map environment. Think
> of displaying labels at 5% the size of map height: it could be easily get
> whith "SIZE mapHeight*0.05", where mapHeight is a built-in variable.
>

I agree with the usability, anyway I would prefer not to introduce a
new scripting language but try to rely on mapscript in the expressions
for example. And I'm a bit scared about the performance impact on
evaluating an expression by default for each feature retrieval. Isn't
this something that should be pluggable instead?

> > I think creating tiles / rendering based on the tiles are somewhat out
> > of the context of the mapserver project and can be impemented by an
> > outer project. There are a couple of projects that have already
> > implemented this.
>
> I didn't know there already were projects with this functionality. Can you
> please tell me which ones are?
>

This is somewhat the tile.php does in ka-map by using php mapscript for example.

Best regards,

Tamas