[OpenLayers-Users] Tiling Map Services

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 11:05:19AM +0000, Jon Blower wrote:
> 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?

TileCache is the only open source tiling server I know of. It serves
TMS, WorldWind, and WMS tiles if you ask for them. In general, I would
highly recommend modifying TileCache, rather than writing your own
reimplementation.

There is nothing difficult about adding another data source of the form
you describe to TileCache: it's simply a new layer type. TileCache
doesn't care about the data, just that it's regular.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta