[Tilecache] Showing ESRI-data in with TileCache

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 10:20:33AM -0700, Michael ??stling wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I'm a ESRI-user that would like to try out this TileCache and OpenLayers.
> From the demos I have seen they look very nice. I  have a question on how I
> should best "eat the elephant".
> I have right now a ArcGIS Server 9.2 application with a mapCache. It is
> built using a MXD-project with something like 200 layers in it. What is the
> best way to show this with openlayers?
> 
> From what i can understand some of the following ways could be possible:
> 
> 1
> Convert the MXD-project to MapServers Map-file.
> Set up a MapServer project.
> Set up the MapServer project as WMS
> Set up TileCach on top of MapServer
> Connect OpenLayers to the Tilecache

How easy/hard this would be would depend on how your data is stored. As
far as I know, MXD is a stylistic layer, like SLD -- what type of data
is on the  backend? ArcSDE, Shapefiles, etc.?

> 2
> Configure ArcGIS Server to be a WMS-service. (of course an expensive
> solution, but just to show the possibility)
> Set up TileCache to read this WMS service
> Connect OpenLayers to the Tilecache

I don't know why this is more expensive -- if this is really the case,
that sucks :( But this wold be the one I typically choose assuming no
licensing cost for any of the options.

> 3
> Configure OpenLayers to read ArcGISServer MapCache.
> Perhaps not possible (yet)

This might be possible to implement for someone who knew:
 * Python
 * The MapCache directory structure.

This person could then implement the setup in a couple different ways:
 * Create a Layer subclass that read from the files on disk. This
   probably makes less sense than creating a...
 * Cache subclass, which simply takes the tile requests it gets and
   turns the location it's reading from into a MapCache file location
   instead of a TileCache file location.

But, to the best of my knowledge, no such thing has yet been built. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta