[Qgis-developer] Is it possible to re-use print composer code to build a web service ?

[Alessandro Pasotti]

Hi,

I've spent a few hours exploring the codebase while I was thinking about
building a web service to generate (vectorial) PDF for a map.

IMHO this would be a must, expecially now that QGIS has entered in the web
service arena with qgis-mapserver.

The idea is to build a qgis-mapserver companion which would take care of
building a PDF representation of the map using the configured project(s) and
a print template.

The idea is that the user can configure the WMS and print template from QGIS
GUI, and have a  WMS + PDF-print service running with a few clicks.

The obvious road for such a service is qgis-mapserver (read layers, map
extent etc. from request like WMS does), + qgis-print-composer (read the
template name, the resolutions and paper format from request) but it seems
like the print-composer cannot work without a GUI, is this correct ?

Of course with a lot of efforts, this program could be built with
python-qgis bindings, but why can't we re-use the existing code? Most of the
functionality is already available in mapserver and printcomposer.

I would really like to hear your opinion on this topic

-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it
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