[OpenLayers-Users] Suggestion for hosting platform?

[David Fawcett]

Jeff,

I sounds like OpenLayers with a WMS or TileCache or tiled WMS layer
would work for you.  Even if you used a pre-rendered tile backend, I
believe that you could still send WMS getFeatureInfo requests to a WMS
server (you would need to keep the data in sync though).

If KaMap wasn't performing well for you, I don't think that just
because KaMap was built on phpMapScript, you should assume that you
will get the same performance from MapServer.

MapServer can serve up WMS pretty well.  You can look at a comparison
of MapServer and GeoServer in the FOSS4G WMS shootout.
http://www.slideshare.net/gatewaygeomatics.com/wms-performance-shootout

The trick to serving any of this data quickly is making sure that you
have pre-processed and optimized/indexed your data as much as possible
to reduce the amount of processing that has to happen at the time of a
request.  As for MapServer vector data sources, I believe that the
common thought is that shapefiles are still faster, but PostGIS
performance has been significantly improved in the past few years.  In
cases where your data is more complex, you have more complicated
filtering needs, or your data changes frequently, the flexibility of
PostGIS is worth the small performance hit.  MapServer also has
support for SQL Server.

David.



If you are familiar with MapServer, you can use it to pre-render the
tiles for your TileCache or WMS-T.

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Jeff Dege <jeff.dege at korterra.com> wrote:
> I'm building a site that involves a couple of editable vector layers drawn
> on top of a landbase.  In development, I've been working with a publicly
> accessible WMS, but that won't fly for our production system.  I need more
> control of what features will be displayed at which resolutions.  So I need
> to set up a landbase server, that I can access from OpenLayers.
>
>
>
> We're planning to start with the Tiger data.  The question is how best to
> host it.  Our previous systems used KaMap layers, creating tiles with
> MapServer, from shape files.  The performance has only been barely
> acceptable, and the configuration has been a constant headache.  So, I'm
> looking for alternatives.
>
>
>
> It looks to me like we've three decisions to make.
>
>
>
> 1st, the access method - the OpenLayers layer type.  WMS?  WFS? WMS-T?
> KaMap, again?  We'd like to have some ability to query features, which we
> don't have with KaMap, but not at the cost of performance.
>
>
>
> 2nd, the data store.  Mapserver and shape files have been fairly slow, for
> us, so we're thinking about using a GIS database.  PostGIS is free, we have
> a license that would allow us to use Microsoft's new GIS capabilities in
> SqlServer.
>
>
>
> 3rd, the actual serving application.  KaMap acts as its own server.  If we
> decide on WMS, using a PostGIS database, what Open Source options are there
> for WMS server applications?  I have a vague understanding that MapServer
> can be configured to run as a WMS server.  How well does it work?  How does
> it perform?
>
>
>
> Does PostGIS have a WMS-serving capability?  SqlServer?
>
>
>
> Discussion?
>
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