[mapserver-dev] Tile Access API

[Paul Ramsey]

Daniel,

On your two main issues:

>  I'm not sure where to stand with respect to this RFC specifically... in my
> opinion, tiling is of little use without caching, and misbehaved clients or
> high traffic sites can easily bring a server to its knees.

The barn door is already wide open on this one, and is already being
traversed, but clients like ArcExplorer over WMS, Google Earth over
WMS, and as you note OpenLayers over WMS.  You put up a server, egads,
people use it!

A tile API is actually an improvement, since it's at least trivially
easy to get proxy caching behavior within the constrained URL space
provided by the tiling system.

>  This gets us to my second point... this RFC opens the door to caching tiles
> directly in MapServer and I'm not sure if we want MapServer to start
> managing a cache when it's real job is to produce maps.

We don't have to go through this door, but there's worse things in the
world than adding orthogonal functionality.  As you note, it could be
built as a piece along-the-side that uses libmapserver but is not
itself mapserv.  If the demand is there, no reason not to do it, if it
is done right.  This API is a chance to test those waters.

Paul