[OpenLayers-Users] Performance of different layers

[Rahn Hanno (rahn)]

Hello list,

I have another question and need a little help. I try to realsie something like a monitoring webgis. For this I have a map with political boundaries. Always the same. And now I will show different indicators in different years. That means that I have some data in a postgis database and now I will color the regions with different colors. Like in any desktop gis. In my webGIS I will give a button and with the button you can change the year of the data. That means with a click the map must be styled in another way. Perhaps with sld or so. The special feature ist, that I plan to realsie 4 map windows. First for the first year, next for the next follwing year and so on.
Now my question. I will realise this with Openlayers as client. But now I need something to create the "map".
What is the best way? I think I can use a Mapserver like UMN. This Mapserver creates the map. For the different Styling I can create a php-skript which will define the different sld-files for the different years. I think this will work, or not?
Is here a diefference between the mapservers like UMN Geoserver or Mapfish in performance speed and so on? Is there another possibility?
But perhaps I can use a single gml/xml file with the geometries of the boundaries. But can I style this with sld, too? I don't want to save hundreds of gml files for each indicator and each year, because a monitoring system must be dynamic and there are new data for each indicator every year. I don't know if it is possible to craete this gml dynamically for each year with the data out of the database.
Perhaps there are other ideas? Can somebody give me some information about that or can show me where I can find some information?

I hope you can understand my bad english and give me some tips, knowhow or experience reports. :-)

Greetings
Hanno Rahn