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Chameleon is intended to be an environment in which to *easily* deploy customizable mapping applications. There is no doubt that chameleon applications are highly customizable, but it could be argued that this cannot be done easily, at least by beginner users. Chameleon is easy to use relative to PHP Mapscript or pure cgi MapServer, but it is still not strictly easy, mainly because there are so many widgets and because of things like shared resources, buttonizer etc. It would be a great advantage to Chameleon users if there was a truly easy, quick deployment mode. In order to be really easy customizability and certain functionality would need to be sacrificed, but this compromise would likely be acceptable to those who want to quickly see some results. Once this mode of operation is mastered, users can move on to more complex application development. Such a mode would be advantageous for new users, trainers, for business development and even for advanced application developers. Enough for one comment... details to follow...
There are probably several ways this could be done and probably several possible goals. I'll provide an ideal situation (which may or may not be possible) and an idea of a more achievable one. First of all, the idea is to allow application developers to use as few tags as possible, ideally only one, to deploy a simple mapping application. Users could supply the chameleon location, mapfile/context location and a few simple attributes like map size and the result would be a map with simple navigation. Some assumptions could be reasonably made, like there will be no keymap, scalebar or other advanced functions. The 'viewer' could include zoom in, out, pan, identify tools etc. - just enough to embed a navigable map in a web page. Perhaps a widget (or compound widget) could be written to do this. This widget would have to use default images for tool buttons, fonts and all other attributes. Ideally there would be no need for any shared resources. A first step could be to develop a 'viewer' widget that could be embedded in a regular HTML template. The HTML template would still need the regular required elements like the onload function and possibly a shared resource or two. The ideal situation would be that a user could just put in a line of code in their HTML page that would embed the chameleon application. The developer would put in something like an <embed> tag with the location of chameleon (local or service instance), the map file and a few attributes and that would be all that was required. If some form of this idea is actually feasible we would need to do a detailed requirements analysis to define how it could work and how the widget would be defined, i.e. what user inputs would be required.
Changed target to FUTURE.
