Projections

Windows

Hello to you all ! I'm going to show you a new application for displaying maps generated by MapServer in a web browser (Internet Explorer 5.5 and upwards, or Mozilla 1.3 and upwards). As with all new applications, the first example is the "Hello World" program . It shows a map of the world in a window inside the browser (for the screenshot presentation the browser's menu and status bars have been left out). This window behaves exactly like a regular desktop window: it can be moved, , resized , and even maximized and minimized by the two rightmost buttons in the title bar.

A window can send requests to a server and display the results, either from a command button, or after an event like resizing. When a request is being processed by the server, the leftmost button turns red . This button also has a submenu, showing all windows in the system . At this moment of course there is only one window.

This window is *not* a regular browser popup window: it is a collection of HTML elements within the main window (mainly SPAN and DIV) with events defined on them. The window knows its own dimensions, so after a resize it can send a new map request to the server with the new dimensions as parameters. The server will compute a map that exactly fits in the window .