Google maps w/ satellite imagery

[Stephen Woodbridge]

There is nothing stopping you from doing just that with mapserver. All
you would have to do is write a script that has a double nested for loop
to iterate over all your spatial data and define the bounding boxes for
each tile, then ask mapserver to generate the tile and save it into your
tree structure. Then do it again for each zoom scale you want. You can
probably take the google javascript and then modify it to request tiles
from your directory tree. You might want to write a very thin php script
that converts tile requests in file requests, but maybe not.

I would be interested in such a script if you want to develop it, in
fact I might have a little time to collaborate on it. I don't thing the
actual script is that hard, I'm not sure about what projection
(lat-long? or otherwise) you would want/need to use so the tiles fit
seamlessly together. It would also be interesting to know how much space
and the number of files needed for each zoom level.

-Steve W.

Mike Davis wrote:
> Ed-
>
> Thanks for the response, I agree that the approach used by Google,
> TerraServer, etc... is rather limiting to those of us who really like
> to tinker with our on-line maps.  I know I have a great time exploring
> Mapserver/IMS sites, checking out all the layers, and browsing around
> to my hearts content.
>
> That being said, I think there is definately a need to improve the
> user experience in web-mapping applications.  Users can be notoriously
> unforgiving when forced to wait, with anything less than instantaneous
> response considered "slow".  For those instances when flexibility is
> not the primary concern, the ability to pre-generate tiles and cache
> them on the client might be a good solution.
>
> Despite the limited nature of Google's mapping site, it definately
> raises the bar for the rest of the web mapping community.
>
> -Mike
>