MapServer Toronto Code Sprint 2009

Agenda

See ​http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Toronto_Code_Sprint_2009_Agenda#Mapserver

Minutes, Actions, Decisions

1. XML mapfiles

• A draft RFC is at http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-51.html
• There are concerns about the use of the CWXML library and the benefits of a binary encoded format
• The need we are trying to address is the ability to build MapFile Editors that would be facilitated by the existence of a XML mapfile format (since the current mapfile format makes it impossible to write a forward-compatible parser)
• There are concerns about having to support another set of parsing functions. Just keeping the existing mapfile.x read/write functions in sync is already a challenge, so adding another set of reader/writer functions for XML will just make this worse.
• Conclusion: After discussion, it was decided that for the time being we should develop a XML schema and a XSLT to convert from XML to text mapfile. If the new XML format takes off then we may consider implementing support for it directly in MapServer in a future release.

Project Sections

• MapServer Documentation
• TorontoCodeSprint2009Documentation

2. Graphical rendering

• Thomas presented the approach of rendering plugins