[mapguide-internals] Tile caching

[Jason Birch]

Hi...

I was just looking at Zac's recent ticket about adding cache headers to
GETTILEIMAGE requests.

https://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/ticket/467

I don't think that this is the best way of presenting our tile caches.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a direct HTTP interface to the cache,
where the user requests a file from the webserver as a resource.  That
way all of the HTTP-goodness (cacheing, etc) is built-in.

I don't think that this would be all that hard to do.  There would have
to be a 404 handler that either generates and sends back images that
don't exist or, if it is unable to generate the image send the
appropriate 400- or 500-level codes.  The only problem that I can see
with this is security.  There would have to be some way for either
MapGuide to use OS or LDAP security (and the web server to use the same)
or for the web server to use the MapGuide user store for authentication.

There was some discussion about MapGuide security earlier (at FOSS4G?)
and I certainly wouldn't be sad to see MapGuide's proprietary security
model replaced with something that tied into OS-level security.

Thoughts?

Jason