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

[Stefan Gofferje]

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