Using Mapserver to generate google like tiles

[Paul Ramsey]

I think there is a more elegant solution to the "google maps speedup"
problem:

- The reason google maps is "fast" is because (a) they restrict
themselves to fixes scales in their UI and (b) they load in the map in
parallel chunks of 128x128 size.

So the answer:

- Write a google maps style client that forces a limited number of fixed
scales, and always generates tiled WMS requests using the same
coordinates for each tile.
- Place a caching proxy between your Mapserver and the world, and tell
your client to always make requests to the caching proxy.

Most of the work is doing the fancy google maps style javascript client.

Paul

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Is anyone out there writing a Perl or PHP/mapscript utility to generate
> google like tiles using mapserver? What are the problems and issues you
> have run into? What is the status of your work?
>
> On the surface it seems pretty straight forward. Just iterate a bounding
> box for your tile size over your map extents and save the tiles based on
> row/column index as its name. Do this for each zoom scale you need.
>
> You need to deal with labels across tile boundaries.
> Should this be done using a projection? Which?
> Projections probably make this more complicated? How?
>
> I was thinking that generating BIG image files and then generating tiles
> from the raster images might be better, because it will reduce the
> number of tile edge artifacts. I was think that Perl and the ImageMagic
> might work well for this?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> -Steve W.