[Tilecache] everyblock use of tilecache & openlayers

[Paul Smith]

On Jan 24, 2008 1:16 PM, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt at metacarta.com> wrote:
> I'd personally argue against involving Mapnik in there, but my inability
> to build it since 0.4.0 is probably negatively affecting my judgement ;)
> Regardless, the maps do look very nice: congrats on putting together a
> pretty setup.

Thanks, Christopher, appreciate your remarks. I too had difficultly
early on with Mapnik, but at some point I realized that working
against SVN trunk was a lot easier, in terms of building and also
stability and features, so I recommend that. I actually am an old
Mapserver hand but made a conscious decision to go with Mapnik, in
order to support a project with explicit Python support ;) It rendered
as well or better than Mapserver for our purposes, so despite the
relatively immaturity of the project, it's worked consistently well.

> Did you pre-generate most of your tiles, or are you building your cache
> on the fly? If the latter, it seems likely that a post-processing step
> to modify the tiles could be useful to you: Are you interested in
> something like this, if I were to write it? (And more importantly, are
> you using 2.x or 1.9? Since I'm unlikely to backport anything I do ...
> :))

We're using tilecache_seed.py (and 2.x), so a post-processing hook in
TileCache would work well for our purposes.

> Congratulations on putting together a slick mapping application: it
> would be interesting if you're able to share some feedback on what made
> you choose TileCache. I've been getting nagged for TileCache 'Case
> Studies' recently, and EveryBlock seems a fine candiate for one, if
> you're interested.

Totally, would be happy to help with a case study. For us it was a
no-brainer: we didn't want to use Google Maps, we wanted to roll our
own maps (because we're focused on displaying news information against
a geographic backdrop, not wayfaring/orienting, and we wanted to have
control over the appearance), so a caching layer was a must-have. I'd
be happy to write more on the topic.

Cheers,
-Paul

-- 
Paul Smith
http://www.pauladamsmith.com/