[mapserver-dev] Tile Access API

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Daniel Morissette wrote:
> Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 05:22:48PM -0400, Daniel Morissette wrote:
>>> In my opinion, tiling requires caching in most cases 
>>
>> Why?
> 
> Performance... non-cached tiles via CGI don't cut it in my opinion... 
> they are fine for a toy project in your basement or perhaps for an 
> intranet with only a few users, but in real life production sites 
> caching is almost a must.
> 
>>
>>> 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.
>>
> 
> Lots of developers seem to misunderstand the day to day reality of their 
> users.
> 
> There are lots (and more than you'd think) of users of MapServer and 
> related tools who have only one foot on the bright side and who work in 
> shops with a close IT department that keeps very tight control on the 
> servers. We had some of those 10 years ago and that's still the sad 
> reality today. It takes months (sometimes years?) of efforts for their 
> IT departments to review, approve and deploy new technologies. So once 
> they've managed to get MapServer through the process the last thing they 
> want is to have to get Python, PHP, and/or a bunch of scripts through 
> the IT approval process.

I have to agree with Daniel on this. This is exactly the issue about 
package dependencies that I was griping about on my GDAL packaging 
thread. IT sysadmins do not know the technology, they do not care, they 
just want to minimize the risk, minimize the changes, etc. They are not 
always enlightened and get cranky if something breaks and they have to 
get up at 3am to fix it.  They want the packages to be updated and and 
not break when they update other system packages for security reasons. 
So adding a caching utility to mapserver would not be a bad thing and I 
would use it for sure.

-Steve

> Funny enough, in many cases in those shops, any script written in VB or 
> .NET will make it through to the server without any problem.
>
>>
>> Still wouldn't solve the problem of idiotproofing configuration, which
>> is the reason I'm in favor of the RFC.
>>
> 
> I guess that's the point I don't get. If the benefit of idiotproofing 
> the config of a tile server is higher than the performance costs then I 
> agree that there is value to this addition.
> 
> Daniel