[ka-Map-users] Architectural questions.

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 02:47:16AM -0800, The Bun wrote:
> 
> 
> > 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?
> 
> I am new to open sources world and the level of documentation if peraphs
> accettable. I didn't mean in terms of technical documentation ( api and code
> examples ) but I meant in terms of architecture, the issues we are talking
> about in this thread. Also in terms of installation and configuration. 

Okay.

> > 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.)
> 
> Well, honestly not exremely slow, we are talking about a WMS anyway, but to
> be more precise I meant mainly the loading ( re-loading ) and the zooming
> but as I said to Paul my comment here was probably a bit premature as I
> haven't tested yet with a caching mechanism yet, I'll do it and I'll come
> back on this point. 

Okay, so it's tile loading time. That's cool, I just wanted to check. 

> > What aspect of OpenLayers do you feel is a bit unstable?  
> 
> Again, this is my first impression, probably a premature comment again, but
> one example? When you use OpenLayers.layer.WMS, in your list of layers if
> you have spaces after the comma your WMS crashes. 

You probably want to use something like:

["My", "List", "Of", "Layers"] 

OpenLayers is doing exactly what you asked for -- specifically, it takes
the string you give it, and it passes it to the server. Since every
server implements things a bit differently, we can't guess what might
cause one to crash vs. another not to. 

I'd be interested in other examples, though.

> I didn't want to be
> offensive to anybody and I don't want to be offensive now, I really
> appreciate the hard work people does on these software but honestly the
> above is a problem which is not a problem. The fact that for a WMS for
> Mapserver there are duplication of settings makes the all architecture a bit
> fragile.

Sure. This is why I'm looking forward to seeing ka-Map rewritten to live
on top of OpenLayers, because there needs to be a simple mapfile-based 
browser application that uses the OpenLayers library :)

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

Because I'm the author of big chunks of OpenLayers :)

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer