#4 Standalone NavDB server

[Anonymous]

Please see the link at the end of the posting to a discussion
in the Atlas/Map feature request tracker concerning the suggestion
to factor out the FlightGear navdb in order to have it become a
standalone entity for FlightGear-related projects making use of
navdb data, using a networked client/server approach to providing
navdb query services to an arbitrary number of clients such as
flightgear, atlas, fgrun, fgsd, taxidraw or fgms.

It is important that all related projects are providing their
opinions on this idea in order to discuss the pros & cons of it.

Following this approach would automatically provide a number of
benefits over the current approach of statically linking to the
required libs and reloading an image of the navdb and its data
into memory for every single instance of a program depending on
the data, for example:

- navdb programs become "clients" and can easily connect to a
running server to send queries

- no need to duplicate the navdb in every program

- helps modularizing overall architecture of Flightgear and its
toolchain

- helps Flightgear tools become easily distributed, as the
navdb server could be easily run even on a separate machine
from flightgear and its various tools

- navdb format, structure and code may change without requiring
clients to be rebuilt, only the server needs to reflect such
changes

Details at:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1848645&group_id=9456&atid=359456