[Zmapserver-developers] New directions for ZMapServer

[Sean G. <sgi...@fr...>]

Hello,

Sean here.  I am just back from a short vacation to the San Juan
islands of Washington.  So peaceful and civilized, must be the
proximity to Canada, eh? :)  I did not bring my computer on the
trip and took the opportunity, while biking and kayaking, to
finally digest all the presentations, workshops, and conversations
which I experienced at the 1st MapServer Users Meeting two weeks
ago.  I've concluded that ZMapServer needs another change of
direction if it is going to be useful to the MapServer community,
and I want to now outline a proposal for this change.

Hearing from J-F Doyon, Daniel Morisette, Ed McNierney, and others
has convinced me that, in order to be relevant, ZMapServer needs to
be very aware of the OGC's WMS specifications.  I have been keeping
this in mind, but now feel that we should probably stop work on
the code in ZSessionMap.py and instead, focus on making ZMapServer
an excellent product for creating WMS Server instances.  I think
that the ZSessionMap stuff could have a better future as separate
group of classes for applications that connect to WMS servers.

To complement the ZMapServer Map, I propose a new Z WMS Adapter
class to provide a convenient interface to external WMS Services.
I think of it as being sorta like a Zope Database Adapter.  Would
be very helpful for collecting, managing, and cataloging WMS.
Below is a small illustration: