[MapServer-users] My first mapserver project - a short review

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi Stefan,

Great to hear this kind of feedback!  I had to chime in because what you 
wrote sounds so much like my own first experience with MapServer and you 
reminded me of my first post to this list... 22 years ago!  Great to see 
that ease of use and performance are still two key differentiators that 
are still true 22 years later!

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapserver-users/2000-January/027641.html

"""
Subject: Wow!
[...]
> 
> I am new to this list and to MapServer, but I thought I should write a
> note just to say that I've been quite impressed with MapServer until
> now!
> 
> Within a couple of hours, I was able to build/install MapServer, get the
> demo running, learn the way map files work and... use it to reproduce
> the most part of a web mapping application that we had previously built
> using a very expensive web mapping package (I won't give names!!!).  And
> the "worst" in all that is that the MapServer version is at least 10
> times faster than the original... Wow!  I can already see lots of
> potential uses for it!
[...]
"""


Daniel



On 2022-10-13 13:21, Stefan Gofferje wrote:
> 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
> 

-- 
Daniel Morissette
Mapgears Inc
T: +1 418-696-5056 #201