[ka-Map-users] Architectural questions.

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 06:51:46AM -0800, The Bun wrote:
> > On 7-Nov-07, at 7:34 AM, The Bun wrote:
> 
> >> I think as "better" mainly the drawing speed: Panning, Zooming,  
> >> caching etc.
> >> But "better" is also a rich and working client API as well. I may  
> >> need more
> >> functionalities like for example, adding features, showing info  
> >> windows,
> >> handling events on the map and the features, run searches
> >> on the layers etc.
> 
> > Then OpenLayers is probably what you should be using.

> I followed your suggestion and started to test OpenLayers. First thing I
> noticed was that there is no much documentation around, but this is a
> problem of all open sources and you need a lot of time to make your code
> running, fortunately at this stage I have some time for experiment so..... 

Interesting. I'm aware that the examples
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/ don't cover everything (though they
do cover a lot of individual functionality), but I'm curious as to how
you think the API docs
(http://dev.openlayers.org/apidocs/files/OpenLayers-js.html) are
lacking?

> In your opinion, or anybody opinion, this is an open discussion, what are
> the advantages of using
> OpenLayers.Layer.MapServer instead of OpenLayers.Layer.WMS?

Pretty much none, except that the former doens't require you to add:

 METADATA wms_srs "EPSG:4326" END

to your mapfile. 

> My first impression with OL anyway is that seems quite slow and quite
> difficult to use as well. 

I think you should be careful to define what you mean by 'slow' when
testing: do you mean that the javascript in the browser seems slow to
load or dragging the map is slow? Or do you mean that the data (tiles)
are slow?

The former is something I haven't personally run into for simple
applications in OpenLayers, but the latter is absolutely going to be
true -- and is outside the realm of OpenLayers. (At that point, your
complaint is actually 'mapserver is slow' -- you just don't know it.)

> I also want to test with the interface of kaMap or
> TileCache and check how much the performances will improve.

You can see TileCache in action at http://tilecache.org/demo.html. 

> Finally, I am not pretty sure I am going to the decide for OpenLayers,
> because, and it is my impression, it seems to be aestetically very nice and
> with a rich API but more difficult to use and a bit unstable 

What aspect of OpenLayers do you feel is a bit unstable?  

> I may prefer
> carrying on with kaMap nevertheless the limitation of the API which
> potentially can be improved.
> What is your opinion?

I doubt that would be the best path forward for you; however, I'm
clearly biased.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer