[mapserver-dev] Tile Access API

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 05:22:48PM -0400, Daniel Morissette wrote:
> In my opinion, tiling requires caching in most cases 

Why? 

> and there is TileCache and co for that, 

TileCache can't change the configuration of the WMS server. The most
difficult part of using TileCache to solve this problem is the fact that
no WMS server was correctly configured to serve up Google-style tiles
until less than a year ago: Heck, very few people even understood *how*
to set it up.

> unless I'm mistaken it works for any WMS and 
> not just MapServer... that should be the preferred solution.

But it doesn't solve the problem that this RFC tries to solve, making an
'idiot proof' spherical mercator setup.

> Yeah, I know what you're thinking, TileCache requires Python and that's 
> one more component to maintain when we already have MapServer installed.

I don't consider this the important showstopper, though others certainly
do.

> 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.

I agree with that, but that's why MapServer should concentrate on
producing maps that TileCache can usefully cache.

> Perhaps a solution if we want an easy to deploy tile service would be
> to re-implement TileCache in C and distribute it with MapServer...
> that would make just one more CGI binary to package with MapServer,
> but since that would be a separate program it could create tiles from
> any WMS service and not just MapServer.

Still wouldn't solve the problem of idiotproofing configuration, which
is the reason I'm in favor of the RFC.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta