[Live-demo] New MapProxy package

[Oliver Tonnhofer]

Hi Cameron,

On 25.05.2011, at 09:58, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> One thing I missed was the size and activity of the community behind MapProxy. Could you please say a few words about that.

We have a quite active mailing list http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapproxy/
Development is still mostly done by us (Omniscale) except occasional bug fixes or small features.
As usual with open source, it is hard to tell where it is in production use outside of our own projects.

> Then on a technical level, I'm interested to understand how MapProxy compares with GeoWebCache and MapTiler, which I think both provide similar functionality.

MapTile is just a tool to create tiles and not a server that can deliver tiles. So they do not really compare.

MapProxy and GeoWebCache are more similar. The obvious difference is that GeoWebCache belongs to the Java tribe, while MapProxy belongs to the C tribe (actually its Python, but it uses some C libs).

They are both tile servers that read data from WMS sources, cache the data on disk and send tiles to clients via TMS or WMTS. But MapProxy has a lot more features that makes it easier to solve more complex use cases. For example:

With MapProxy you can create cascading WMS service that collects layers from different servers. You can limit the extent of each layer with shapefiles and group layers from different servers into your own layer tree. You can enable caching for each layer/layer group. The caching does not only work for tiled requests but also for arbitrary WMS requests (with support for all resolutions - free zomming). It also supports on-the-fly reprojection of cached or cascaded data. You can configure most options for each layer/cache individually (like resampling method).
FeatureInfo and Legend requests are still supported. FeatureInfo from different servers can be unified with XSLT.

The seeding tool (for pre-caching) is also much more powerful. You can define the seed extent with shapefiles and the tool is more efficient in general (multi-threaded, optimized seed strategy).

Hope thats enough information :) 

Regards,
Oliver

-- 
Oliver Tonnhofer    | Omniscale GmbH & Co KG    | http://omniscale.de
http://mapproxy.org | https://bitbucket.org/olt | @oltonn