I'm guessing this isn't an approach you're likely to take unless it is for a major project, however I'll throw my 2 cents in.

esri offers a product called IMS which is an internet map server. The communication between the client and server can occur through a servlet connector in which XML requests are passed back and forth, or an Active X connector. The product ships with an HTML client which is basically a whole lot of Javascript which builds and parses the XML requests and responses. The requests are then sent via javascript by submitting a form in a hidden frame. If the request is to generate an image the response contains the URL of the generated map. The client then replaces the map with the new map. This allows for dynamic things like zooming and panning to occur. For instance you select a bounding box within the client. It calculates the bounding box and sends the request to the map service which then generates the image. I've done a lot of things using LWP, HTML::Template for XML templating, and XML::Parser to read the resulting response.

This reference to ArcXML might give you a feeling for its capabilities as well as some ideas for approaches you might want to use in your project.

In reply to Re: Generating a map using perl by vroom
in thread Generating a map using perl by Baz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.