[Tilecache] Newb questions about Tilecache

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 06:56:37AM -0600, David Raasch wrote:
> 
> Greetings All!
> 
> OK, I've built an OpenLayers mapping application "on-the-side" for my
> day-job.  I'm giving users the option to view the map using tiles from the
> following TMS sources:
> 
> OpenStreetMap (Mapnik)  -- http://a.tile.openstreetmap.org
> OpenAerialMap --
> http://tile.openaerialmap.org/tiles/1.0.0/openaerialmap-900913/
> OpenStreetMap (Tiles at Home) -- http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Tiles/tile/
> (my personal favorite of the three!)
> 
> 
> Anyways, although a lot of tiles load very quickly (more quickly than Google
> Maps' tiles, which is what a previous incarnation of my app used to use)...
> Frequently I'll see anywhere from 1-3 tiles take quite a long time to load
> (on the order of 20-30 seconds).
> 
> So, after doing some reading in the archives of the OpenLayers list and this
> one, I thought I'd ask a few questions, just to make sure I'm not
> misunderstanding something:
> 
> 
> 1) I'm under the impression that Tilecache will give me the ability to store
> frequently called-for map tiles from one of these TMS sources in a disk
> cache on our webserver, so that my application won't have to directly
> request those same tiles again and again from that TMS source / server.
> (And, hopefully, this would speed up performance somewhat too.)  Is that
> correct?

Nope. TileCache will read from many datasources, but an existign TMS
datasource is not one of them.

> 2) If that's true, then can a single installation of TileCache be configured
> so that it stores tiles from any / all of those three TMS sources?

If it could read TMS at all, it would be able to.

> 3) I managed to install Python and Tilecache on an IIS / Windows webserver
> here late yesterday.  Is there any other software that I would need in order
> to do what I am suggesting?

Probably not, but Python under IIS CGI is likely to be *much* slower
than these tile services.

> 4) Can you point me to any info on how I'd alter the tilecache.cfg file so
> as to "point to" one of those data sources (or all three!) ??

if there was such a thing as TMS support, it would pobably look like:

[mapnik]
type=TMS
url=http://tah.openstreetmap.org/tah/
spherical_mercator=yes

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta