tommy's scratchpad

I’ve been working with MapServer since 2000. In October 2006, I was added as a committer to the codebase. Since then, I’ve been working on mainly OGC support and Perl mapscript type issues. After a few months, here are some things which I would like to see at some point in MapServer from a developer’s point of view.

1./ libxml2 support: it would be of benefit to MapServer to have XML support taken care of by libxml2. Currently, MapServer uses msIO_printf, which, while functional, is prone to XML errors in particular when outputting XML. libxml2 takes care of closing tags, quoting attributes, namespaces, schemas, and a slew of other functionality. Also, coding MapServer XML in libxml2 allows for extensibility (e.g. applying a stylesheet via mapfile configuration).

2./ Better organized codebase: something like:

• mapserver/
  • etc/
  • core/
  • formats/
  • mapscript/
  • ogc/
  • tests/
  • util/

3./ subversion: It’s nice to see MapServer move towards a shared infrastructure like OSGeo‘s and leverage trac for issue tracking. Already an improvement over bugzilla, trac also plays nice with subversion. So hopefully it will just be a matter of time before the codebase gets ported from CVS.