[Gdal-dev] WCS Client Driver

[Daniel Morissette]

See question below...

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 
> Because the of diversity of situations several read strategies will be
> supported.
> 
> 1) Block oriented with caching.  All requests to the remote server will
> made based on the block size, and the blocks will be cached normally in
> the GDAL memory block cache.  The default block size should be substantial,
> perhaps 2MB blocks the width of the image.
> 
> 2) 1:1 RasterIO() to GetCoverage. Each RasterIO() request will result in a
> remote GetCoverage request at the resolution and for the exact region
> requested.  Because of the irregular nature of requests, caching is
> impractical.
> 
> 3) Hybrid.  Block oriented with caching will be used for smallish requests,
> while very large RasterIO() requests will be done as an immediate call but
> expanded to block boundaries and the result pushed into the block 
> cache.  The
> benefit is that several blocks may be handled in a single request.
> 
> The default operation will be to use the Hybrid mode.  Specific strategies
> and block sizes can be forced via the service description file.
> 

If I'm not mistaken, none of these approach will allow caching that can 
benefit stateless applications such as MapServer. i.e. if I use the 
GDAL-WCS driver to access a remote WCS with MapServer, since each 
request launches a new process then I won't get any caching, right?

While it is true that most requests to MapServer apps use different 
BBOXes, it is very common to have an initial view that is always the 
same or to have a set of predefined views and these predefined views may 
account for a large portion of all hits to a server, so caching can be 
beneficial in that case.

Would it be possible to have another method, possibly an extension of 
the hybrid method, but that caches the images on disk. This way, image 
blocks that are used frequently by apps such as MapServer would already 
be on disk.

The implementation could be as simple as using the WCS request data (GET 
URL) to forge the filename of the file in the cache. Then before issuing 
a request you check if you already have the file on disk. This is how 
the WFS client code does caching in MapServer.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/