[lug] Maps and DLGs and stuff.

[D. Stimits]

John Starkey wrote:
> 
> Hello all again.
> 
> Anyone know of a good OS Web-based MapServer? I've been chopping them up with PHP and the toll on the server is really bad. An 11 meg map cut into a 400x400 square crashes everything. I'm trying this with 64 megs but will be up'ing that to 192 this week.
> 
> I was also considering the possibility of parsing DLGs using PHP but I'm not sure if I'm ready for the curve. I just started my cartographic quest a few weeks ago. Has anyone here tried pulling DLG data from a DB and parsing it into a GIF in web-time?
> 
> I've checked out freegis.org and a few of the leads in the BLUG archives. MapServer was really the only hit that I could find.
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> 
> John
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My prior job was writing NT DLL's to integrate geocoding and SQL for web
page output. I can tell you that even the proprietary packages suck.
There were some java classes and java packages that did the job quite
nicely for free, though I can't remember which they were (the company I
worked for wasn't interested in using anything that was free...there was
a fear level involved). So if you look around for java based support,
you can probably find it (I might be able to ask someone about it). One
of the things about many of the commercial products is that they use
stupid algorithms or bad caching that screws the cache, or just plain
hogs more memory than it should.

I had personally considered writing my own for C++ with Apache to use
the free Tiger data (Tiger is a subset of the U.S. census data, stripped
for only "interesting" mapping features...e.g., it skipped things like
household income). I made an import utility to get the basics into
MySQL, but never went further with it for various reasons. I am curious
what you are going to create?

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com