[OpenLayers-Users] Multi-User Applications

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:16:58AM -0700, Bill Thoen wrote:
> I'm working on an OpenLayers application that requires the user to 
> create a polygon that is used in a separate server-side calculation so I 
> have to turn it into a shape file first. For any one user, I can just 
> create a new PostGIS table and simply call it "RegionOfInterest" and 
> then run the CGI script to perform the calculation and add the new 
> features to the user's map.

I would say that "creating a new database for this is a mistake." If the
action is really a single request -- that is, you're not using the data
again -- then I would investigate ways to not have the data stored
permanantly anywhere.

Some things that i might use would be the tempfile librar in Python, to
generate a temporary filename, then create a shapefile from that, do the
processing you've got set up, and return the data.

Alternatively, if the processing could be turned into a Python script --
even one which depended on other libraries -- I might simply integrate a
new action into WebProcessingServer.

Of coures, web processing server is just a fancy webserver wrapper
around simple CGI calls, so you can always just make yourself a simple
cgi that takes data and acts on it.

So, without more information about what kind of processing you're doing,
it's hard to suggest what you should do instead; but I'd say that
storing things in a database just to get them into a shapefile seems
like mistake number one if you're not using the data again later...
which you haven't said that you are.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta