[OpenLayers-Users] WMS ligthness vs. WFS overlay

[Paul Spencer]

I always thought that WMS was intended for visualization and WFS was  
intended for feature access/query type operations.  I think using WFS  
for visualization in a web client is always going to have a drawback  
in this respect (too much data overwhelms the browser).  It also has  
some advantages, obviously, so which you use really depends on your  
use case.  WMS servers often don't support customization of styling  
and you have to resort to WFS plus some rendering engine like  
MapServer (or as client-side vectors in OpenLayer) to get your own  
look and feel.  Editing is another case for WFS.  And finally, once  
you have the data in WFS, you don't need to request it again whereas  
WMS you typically need to re-request the same data for relatively  
minor changes in extent - this is what cacheable WMS (tiles) partly  
solves.

Cheers

Paul

On 4-Feb-08, at 10:57 AM, Andrea Maschio wrote:

> Hi all,
>        creating a sort of overlay of a wms with opacity set to
> 0.something would be a good replacement for a WFS layer? I am having  
> big
> troubles displaying a big WFS layer so was thinking at this  
> possibility.
>
> Thanks
>
> --
>
> Andrea Maschio
> http://www.superandrew.it
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