Project Status Report – What is MapServer? – MapServer History

Project Status Report

FOSS4G-Europe 2014 - Bremen - 2014-07-15

Stephan Meißl stephan.meissl@eox.at @Schpidi

Thomas Bonfort tbonfort@terriscope.fr @tbonfort

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Good morning everybody.

For those who don't know me already, my name is Stephan Meissl, I made my first steps with MapServer back in 2002, became committer in 2011, and last year the honor of being elected to the PSC. Co-founder of EOX in Vienna, Austria.

Thomas, probably the currently most active MapServer developer, originally planned to be here but unfortunately couldn't make it.

What is MapServer?

• Open Source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the Web
• MIT-style license
• Runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
• OSGeo project
• mapserver.org

MapServer History

• 1989-90: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web
• 1994: Steve Lime implements Web-based Arc/Info AML generator
• 1995: NASA Fornet project ⇒ imgserv

• 1994-95?: Frank Warmerdam releases Shapelib
• 1996: Shapelib + GD ⇒ mapserv
• 1997: v1.0 (limited sharing)
• 1998: v2.0 via Fornet website
• 1999: v3.0 via UMN MapServer website

• 2000: Daniel Morissette joins development ⇒ Need for distributed collaboration tools (CSV, Bugzilla, Wiki)
• 2000+: Further contributors start joining quickly
• 2000: v3.1 including MapScript

• 2001: PostGIS support by Paul Ramsey in v3.6
• 2002: GRASS Users Conference - Trento

• 2003-05: Yearly MapServer Users Meeting (MUM) (Minneapolis, Ottawa, & Minneapolis)

Steve and Daniel meet for the first time after working together for over 3 years

• 2005: MapServer Book by Tyler Mitchell
• February 4, 2006: Foundation of OSGeo MapServer is among eight founding projects

• 2006+: FOSS4G Conferences (Lausanne, Victoria, Cape Town, Sydney, Barcelona, Denver, Nottingham, and Portland)

• 2009+: C Tribe Code Sprints (Toronto, New York, Montreal, Island Wood, Boston, Vienna)

• 2011: v6.0
• 2012: Addition of TinyOWS & MapCache ⇒ MapServer Suite (v6.2)
• 2013: v6.4
• 2014: v7.0
• 20th anniversary

Statistics

• ~150k Lines Of Code
• ~30 committers
• Mailing lists
  • -users ~1800
  • -dev ~400
• International PSC
  • 14 members
  • NA: 9 (US: 5, CA: 4)
  • EU: 5 (FR: 2, IT: 1, AT: 1, HU: 1)
• 110 RFCs

MapServer 7.0

• Main new features
  • UTFGrids
  • WFS 2.0
  • Heatmaps/Density Maps
  • Javascript/V8 StyleItem/Geomtransform
  • Unification of attribute/geometry filtering
• Others
  • Text rendering re-factoring
  • GD Removal
  • Removed BITMAP labels
  • Layer Level Encoding
  • WCS 2.0 extensions

UTFGrids

• Specification by MapBox for vector tiles
• Implemented in a "Google Summer of Code" project
• Interactivity important (rollover, events)
• Supported by OpenLayers
• Not yet supported in MapCache

WFS 2.0

• Download Services for INSPIRE

HeatMaps

• Vector to raster processing pipeline
• Interpolation and rendering parameters
  • Automatic scaling
  • Interpolation in color spaces RGB/HSL
  • Weighting per attribute/expression
• Supports tile mode

Interpolation in HSL color space

Interpolation in HSL color space

Interpolation in RGB color space

Pure density

Setting a fixed scale

Javascript (V8) StyleItem/GeomTransfom

• Integration of the V8 JavaScript engine
• Style geometries/features programatically rather than through class expressions
• "Experimental mode": backward compatibility not guaranteed

LAYER
    ...
    STYLEITEM "javascript:///path/to/my/file.js"
    CLASS # empty class required
    END
END

//Make symbol size 14 or 7
  var size = shape.attributes.NAME.length > 10 ? 14:7;

  var style = "STYLE SIZE " + size;
  style += " SYMBOL 'circle'";
  style += " COLOR 255 0 0 END";

  //Return style to MapServer
  style;

Unification of attribute/geometry filtering

• Currently filtering done by MapServer
• PostGIS, Oracle, OGR support native spatial filtering e.g.

where st_intersects(the_geom, st_geomfromtext('wkt...'))

Text rendering re-factoring

• Before naive implementation duplicated for each back-end
• Integration of Harfbuzz library
• Supports complex text layout e.g. for Arabic text
  • Unprocessed characters
  • With bi-directional processing
  • With glyph shaping rendering letters according to context
• Barely visible to the end user, but
  • Exact label placement (alignment/centering/letter spacing of text)
  • Possibility of using one font per language

Improving performance

Example Malayalam

Example Tibéto-Birman

GD Removal

• Added back in 1995
• Too high maintenance costs despite its usefulness in certain niches
• Automatic fall-back to AGG + 8bit

Removed BITMAP labels

• Truetype font included by default now
• Supports many glyphs without external dependencies
• A few use cases are not supported
• Automatic fall-back in place

Layer Level Encoding

• Solves encoding handling problems e.g. data sources in multiple encodings in a single mapfile
• Data sources internally converted to UTF8
• The mapfile has to be encoded in UTF8 now
• All output generated by MapServer in UTF8

WCS 2.0 extensions

• Officially released beginning of the year
• Passes all available CITE tests
• Official OGC WCS 2.0 Reference Implementation

Documentation translation

• Started to use transifex for simple collaboration
• Attract further translations

MapCache

• REST Back-end
  • Support GET/PUT/DELETE for storing tiles
  • Authentication/authorization plug-ins for S3, Azure, and Google Cloud Storage
  • Costs highly depend on the use case (number of applications, bandwidth)
• TIME animations
  • Extend existing TIME support
  • Mode "animation"
  • Animated GIFs for now, video formats possible

How to Contribute?

• Users
  • Beta and release candidate testing
  • Bug reports on Github, including test cases
  • Documentation (wiki, transifex, Github pull requests)
  • Answers on the mapserver-users list and IRC
• Developers
  • Bug fixes/patches
  • New features
  • Binary builds