[Tilecache] Active community för Tilcache?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 11:06:31AM +0200, bjorn.hagstrom at orebro.se wrote:
> I'm involved in a project (I am a usability guy, not a coder) creating
> interactive maps for the county I live in. We are using openlayers and
> would like to use tilecache. The consultants setting it up have only done
> so a few times and it worked well on Apache but they had trouble on IIS. Is
> this the way it generally is? Is Apache the recommended web server for
> Tilecache?

Apache is better tested. The TileCache devs are almost universally
*nix/Mac guys of some sort, so we seldom have IIS to test with, and
therefore, it gets less Love. It should be possible to configure with
IIS, but to be honest, I've just never done it, though others have
reported success using the insructions in the README.txt.

> The guys running the servers here are a bit hesitant in using Apache. They
> say they have had problems with apps bundling Apache and then not updating
> it regularly. 

TileCache does not bundle Apache.

> This makes it hard to patch Apache and we can get an unsecure
> environmnt as a result. 

This should not be a problem with TileCache: you'll still need to keep
apache up to date, but no security fix I've ever seen for Apache would
affect TileCache.

> I like that they think about this stuff but I'm wondering if this will
> be a problem for us? Will using tilecahce make us dependant on
> tilecache updating before we can apply patches to Apache? 

No.

> How active
> is the community around Tilecache? Are there unreasonable delays
> before updates are released?

There has never been a security-style bug discovered in TileCache and
passed on to me, so I don't know how we'd react to something like that,
but I do generally offer very short turnaround time on things that have
obvious fixes.  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta