If you're looking to do mapping stuff there is a whole body of specifications, and open source implementations, to do exactly what you want. To get a map you can use the Web Map Service specification - there is a Java implementation called GeoServer - http://geoserver.sourceforge.net and a strong C implementation called MapServer - http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ The specs are done by the Open Geospatial Consortium - http://opengeospatial.org - and the WMS one is quite mature, at the time they developed it SOAP was quite young - they're making soap bindings for their web services now. WMS spec is here: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=5316
Unfortunately there is no real good intro to the WMS spec, when I find time I may just do one. There is a not very good 'cookbook' here: http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=cookbooks And I'm happy to answer any further questions on the geoserver lists. A WMS will easily return maps as gifs, or other formats, and indeed there are many clients that will allow you to zoom and navigate, and to overlay the map you're requesting with maps from other WMS servers. You make requests generally with key value pairs in the url, or through XML post requests. (sorry for the random post without introducing myself - I'm mostly lurking on the list for the discussion of micro kernel stuff - we're thinking about many similar issues in the context of geoserver, wanting a plug-in architecture for geospatial applications.) best regards, Chris On 6/3/05, Sebastien Arbogast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > BTW I forgot to mention something. The purpose of my webservices is > not to create some RPC interface to my business code. In fact I want > to use the document style to generate XML documents using Cocoon > sitemap facilities and feed them into my SOAP responses. And of course > I want to use parameters I can extract from the SOAP request message > body as parameters for the code that generates those documents. For > example I receive this kind of SOAP request : > > <SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/";> > <SOAP-ENV:Header/> > <SOAP-ENV:Body> > <wifilist> > <location x="23.764578" y="87.875468" z=".7688"/> > <range radius="1000" unit="meters"/> > </wifilist> > </SOAP-ENV:Body> > </SOAP-ENV:Envelope> > > And I want to send back a SOAP response with a graphic map in > attachment spotting all the wifi hotspots 1000meters around the > specified position. Maybe something like : > > <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"; > xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"; > xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema";> > <soapenv:Body> > <html > soapenv:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/";> > <body> > <img src="map.gif"/> > </body> > </html> > </soapenv:Body> > </soapenv:Envelope> > > With map.gif in attachment of course. > I know it's not very frequent as a usage of webservices but I need > something like that. > I hope it gives you a better idea of what I'm trying to achieve... > > -- > Sebastien ARBOGAST >
