[OpenLayers-Users] Tiling Map Services

[Jon Blower]

Hi everyone,

Most access to our WMS is through OpenLayers, which creates tiles of
images of fixed extents and resolutions.  There are various solutions
for increasing the efficiency of tiled map access, including
TileCache, Tile Map Service (TMS,
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Tile_Map_Service_Specification) and
Tiled WMS (http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov/tiled.html).

I don't think TileCache is suitable for my needs out of the box,
because I need to cache data arrays, not images (the client can change
the colour scale for rendering the same data into different images).
However, TMS and TWMS look like they might work for me.  I notice that
OpenLayers has a TMS layer class but, on the other hand, a TMS looks
very different to a WMS and therefore it would be significant
development effort on my part to create a TMS.

Does anyone have a feel for how mature the TMS and TWMS specifications
are and how widely adopted (or otherwise) they might be?

Thanks, Jon

-- 
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Dr Jon Blower              Tel: +44 118 378 5213 (direct line)
Technical Director         Tel: +44 118 378 8741 (ESSC)
Reading e-Science Centre   Fax: +44 118 378 6413
ESSC                       Email: jdb at mail.nerc-essc.ac.uk
University of Reading
3 Earley Gate
Reading RG6 6AL, UK
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