Paul, You've finally helped me to figure out what might be going on with my setup. The thought has crossed my mind several times about moving to a different application framework. Your description of the Chameleon framework seems right on par with my experiences with it. What frameworks do you have experience using along with MapServer? Thanks.
- Tim ---- Timothy J Nolte - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Associate Network Planning Engineer iPCS Wireless, Inc. 4717 Broadmoor Ave, Suite G Kentwood, MI 49512 Office: 616-656-5163 PCS: 616-706-2438 Fax: 616-554-6484 Web: www.ipcswirelessinc.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Spencer Sent: Monday, February 11, 2008 8:26 PM To: MapGuide Users Mail List Subject: Re: [mapguide-users] Differences between UMN MapServer & MapGuide... Martin, I disagree with your statement that MapGuide will have far more development and support going forward. Caveat Emptor: The arguments that follow are purely my opinion and are not based in empirical evidence, mostly just my observations having worked with both platforms. Take them with a grain of salt :) MapServer has a large and active developer community spread across individuals and companies that actively improve the software on a daily basis. The MapServer mailing list is large and very helpful, and there is a wealth of user-contributed documentation that grows with every release. MapServer's code base is (in comparison) small, light weight, understandable. It has a relatively low cost of entry for new developers wanting to do stuff. MapGuide, on the other hand, is still largely dependent on a single (but very large) benefactor and has yet to attract additional (core) developers outside of the core team from ADSK. It does have a growing community support infrastructure through this mailing list, which is probably the first step towards growing the development community. The code base is quite large, complex, and not readily understandable by a developer wanting to get started with it. None of this points to 'far more' development or support going forward. I would also argue that MapServer, when properly configured, is faster than MapGuide - at rendering maps. If you need to generate map images for the web, MapServer is generally going to be faster than MapGuide. There are some fundamental differences, though, that need to be understood when making this comparison. 1) Enterprise scalability. It has been said that MapGuide is intended for Enterprise deployment (it supports multiple 'web tier' installations accessing multiple site/support servers potentially through a corporate firewall and distributed across multiple machines. ) with the implication that MapServer is not Enterprise ready. In fact, this is not true and it is equally as possible to set up a similar architecture using MapServer - the main difference is that MapGuide has an installer that sets this up whereas the MapServer solution would have to be designed by a knowledgeable group. When requesting a map image, then, MapGuide has a minimum of three processes that need to be involved - the web server, the 'web tier', and the 'server tier'. MapServer only has two, the web server and the MapServer process. 2) Statefulness. MapGuide is stateful in that you have to establish a session with the server and refer to that session in every request to the server. MapServer is stateless and has no inherent concept of sessions. For applications that require statefulness, MapGuide is typically simpler to use whereas MapServer requires an external framework to make it stateful and that framework adds overhead that makes the performance of MapGuide perhaps better than MapServer. For applications that don't require statefulness (such as serving WMS or Tile requests), MapServer is simply faster because it doesn't have the overhead of statefulness built into its architecture (granted that for WMS and Tiles - MGOS 2.0 only - you can request images directly without needing a session, so that is less of a difference). 3) Optimization. Optimizing for MapGuide and MapServer are very different tasks. For both, you really need to understand the expensive parts of drawing a map - is it accessing the data, filtering it, classifying it, or rendering it - and how to minimize bottlenecks in each of the parts. I would argue that it is more feasible to tune MapServer's performance than MapGuide's. This is, in part, because you have more options with MapServer - different ways of accomplishing the same task. MapGuide is probably more tuned to start with but my experience is that beyond optimizing your data, there isn't much more you can do to tune MapGuide's performance by playing with cartographic options. For data access, MapGuide has FDO, OGR and GDAL support. MapServer supports roughly the same set of data sources, except it doesn't support FDO and hence can't access SDF files. DWF support is not part of FDO, and its actually more of an *output* format than an *input* format. It also requires an activex control to render it, which makes it more-or-less useless to me and many others that need applications that support multiple web browsers and platforms. An FDO connection type for MapServer has been discussed and seems likely to happen at some point, although no specific plans have been made - so MapServer will gain access to SDF at that point. Regarding speed of data access, MapServer is generally considered fastest when used with properly prepared shapefiles, although PostGIS is arguably on par with it. MapGuide is generally considered fastest when used with SDF. I have had very poor success with SDE access (MapServer is about 3-6 times faster at drawing from an SDE data source) in MapGuide. I have no knowledge of Oracle Spatial in either platform, although MapGuide is supposed to be quite good with Oracle. Cartographically, the two are quite similar. MapServer has quite a few more options for styling data at this time, but MapGuide has some really nice styling features that MapServer doesn't have. Again, it depends on what your critical factors are. I would say that in general it is possible to achieve the same effect with both servers unless you have somewhat specialized needs. MapGuide is arguably poorer with raster data sources. MapServer can do things like raster classification and raster querying, whereas MapGuide can just render them as-is (I think I saw hill shading show up in MGOS 2.0, which MapServer doesn't support). On the other hand, since MGOS 1.2 there are some extremely complex cartographic things you can do especially with line work that are not possible at this time in MapServer. Coming back to Tim's original question, though, I think that perceived performance in this case is likely 'application' performance. As noted above under statefulness, application performance doesn't compare directly because you have to use another framework with MapServer. In this case, Chameleon was built on pre-ajax web technologies and is particularly poor compared to MapGuide, Fusion, MapFish, MapBuilder, etc which have all kept up with, or been written for, the times. Chameleon is quite horrible in fact - it does all its calculations on the server, creating high load and reducing responsiveness of the server under multiple simultaneous user load, and it reloads the page on every request which multiplies the problem. 'Modern' frameworks put a lot of the processing on the client side (in javascript), which reduces server load dramatically and allows a server to 'scale up' to meet higher load, minimizes the amount of information that needs to be transfered back and forth, and uses ajax techniques to keep the application responsive even while it is waiting for server-side processing to happen. So at the end of the day, my feeling is that the problem is with the framework that Tim is using around MapServer, not with MapServer itself. The real question is which framework should Tim move to. And on that particular subject, I don't have enough experience with platforms other than Fusion to comment on effectively. Cheers Paul On 8-Feb-08, at 4:28 PM, Martin Morrison wrote: > I don't have statistics, but years ago I played around with MapServer, > it was all right, but was not polished or speedy. I find that > MapGuide > can be both. MapGuide also will allow for more types of data SDF, DWF > to name two. > > I think MapGuide will have far more development and support going > forward. > > Just my 2 cents. > > Martin > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nolte, > Tim > Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:24 PM > To: MapGuide Users Mail List > Subject: RE: [mapguide-users] Differences between UMN MapServer & > MapGuide... > > I guess what I am looking for is what are the strengths and weaknesses > of both. Basically our MapServer currently serves both Shapefiles (39 > layers) & Oracle Spatial (11 layers) data. My biggest concern is > user-perceived performance. Our current server config is a 3.06GHz > Opteron w/ 8GB of RAM. I've tried to tune our data as best I can > however > I'm still concerned about the end-user perceived performance. As most > people are, I'm up against people expecting our MapServer to perform > with the same speed as Google Maps. I'm also looking for something > with > a very visually polished development framework. I know that looks > aren't > everything but it does offer some credibility to the information being > presented. Thanks for any input anyone has. > > - Tim > > ---- > Timothy J Nolte - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Associate Network Planning Engineer > > iPCS Wireless, Inc. > 4717 Broadmoor Ave, Suite G > Kentwood, MI 49512 > > Office: 616-656-5163 > PCS: 616-706-2438 > Fax: 616-554-6484 > Web: www.ipcswirelessinc.com > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jason > Birch > Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:05 PM > To: MapGuide Users Mail List > Subject: RE: [mapguide-users] Differences between UMN MapServer & > MapGuide... > > I guess I should ask what your reasons for considering moving away > from > MapServer are. What needs do you have that it is not meeting? > > They both certainly have their strengths and weaknesses, but I don't > know if any recent in-depth analysis of the differences. > > Jason > _______________________________________________ > mapguide-users mailing list > mapguide-users@lists.osgeo.org > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users > > _______________________________________________ > mapguide-users mailing list > mapguide-users@lists.osgeo.org > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users _______________________________________________ mapguide-users mailing list mapguide-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users _______________________________________________ mapguide-users mailing list mapguide-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-users