Territorium Online GmbH develops a native, standalone TCP/IP server running as NT
service or daemon on Microsoft Windows and Linux, respectively, which interfaces to
UMN Mapserver. The application accepts map and query requests in XML form based on a
schema close to ArcXML with adaptations to Mapserver's business logic and without
some of the unnecessary overhead of the ESRI counterpart. Using Mapserver's C API it
produces map images and query results and shapefile extracts out of the requested
options. Includes support for on-the-fly adding of "acetate"/annotation layers,
renderers and much more. Significant effort has been put into investigating
Mapserver's threading support and exploring possible optimizations, resulting in a
multithreaded, performance oriented but stable and resource efficient server
application. The idea is to introduce in the application and discuss possible
improvements (including a standalone WMS/WFS server based on Mapserver) and the use
of such a technique for the community.