[MapServer-users] My first mapserver project - a short review
Stefan Gofferje
lists at home.gofferje.net
Thu Oct 13 10:21:55 PDT 2022
Hi all,
so I just basically completed my first little mapserver project - an "off-
grid/emergency" mapserver for a Raspberry Pi.
Although I played with mapserver for a moment about 1.5 years ago, I would say
that I entered into the project with zero knowledge of mapserver, mapcache and
only general user-level knowledge of GIS in general. I am a Linux geek,
though...
I was able to get my target functionality - serving a multi-resolution
topographic map of Finland from Finnish Land survey data via WMS in about 12
hours over 2 days focused tinkering. Not sure if that's generally fast or slow
but I'm pretty happy with how it went. I relied mostly on Google searches, of
course on the documentation and I got some really good ("jackpot") pointers
from the community on this list. Only thing missing now is a script for
automatic pulling, sorting into folders, gdaltindex'ing and ogrinfo'ing of the
raw data. Once I have that ready, I'm planning to post either to my blog or
maybe put it to Github.
Following are just some random thoughts which I thought my interest the
community or the developers.
Why did I selected mapserver originally?
Because GeoServer is Java and I don't like Java. That actually was my original
primary reason :D. After getting into mapserver, though, I have a few more
reasons to like it, the primary being the structure of the map files and the
fact that it hot reloads map files without a restart. I can come up with a
thousand new use cases and ideas for mapserver for me just because of the map
files and how easy they can be created programmaticly.
What do I think of mapserver now?
I love it! First: map files (see above). The map file structure makes sense to
me as a non-GIS-expert and with a few exceptions (projections... ... ...) is
pretty logical. Then the relatively low memory footprint (I run way too many
containers on my poor little tinker server at home...). Also, performance is
quite good on my hardware for my use case so far.
Documentation...
Oh well... The documentation is - well - thorough... But it's not "fast".
Basically, if you don't know anything about mapserver, you kinda have to read
and understand the whole documentation before you can get a mapserver started.
You gotta become an expert first and then you can run the server. I personally
like to get started with new things so, that I start something small which I
then slowly expand or use as a base for new, bigger ideas. That way, my
knowledge grows slower but I have something working pretty quickly. Luckily,
mapserver seems to have a huge user base and there's a ton of blog posts,
tutorials and examples out there, so together with that, the documentation
used for filling the gaps which the community documents leave, it worked well
for me.
I would though like to suggest a few "Quick start guides" for common use
cases, such as a WMS server, which can get a newbie up and running faster.
Which leads me to the community...
Guys, you're fantastic! I think, in my 35 years of using Linux, I have never
gotten replies to questions on a mailing list as fast as here. And good
replies! And all those blog posts and little snippets out there... Awesome!
Seriously, just the community makes me want to come up with some new use cases
:D.
So much for now... See you all soon on my next mapserver project :D
-Stefan
--
(o_ Stefan Gofferje | SCLT, MCP, CCSA
//\ Reg'd Linux User #247167 | VCP #2263
V_/_ https://www.gofferje.net | https://www.saakeskus.fi
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