[Tiling] announcing mod_geocache: an apache tiling module

[thomas bonfort]

Hi fellow tilers,
(sorry for the cross-posting, all following responses and discussions
will or should be directed to tiling at lists.osgeo.org )

This is my first message to the list, to present myself and a new
project I've been working on.
I'm thomas bonfort, an independant developper mostly involved in
mapserver development. Having followed the tiling sessions at
Barcelona, it seemed to me like a good idea to explore having a tiling
backend directly as an apache module (i.e directly implemented in C).
I have a preliminary implementation hosted at
http://code.google.com/p/mod-geocache/, that currently supports WMS
requests (as a client and server), metatiling and dynamic tile
merging. The architecture is very much inspired by the tilecache code.

the aims of the project are:
 * keep performance in mind at all times
 * simplify server deployment, not having to install and configure
python/mod_python/...
 * support wms backends, and offer frontends for wms, wmts and tms
 * enable (by configuration) the proxying or rescaling of requests
that cannot be directly served from cache
 * various image optimisations (watermarking, quantization, ...)

a preliminary benchmark againt tilecache can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/mod-geocache/wiki/PreliminaryBenchmark

I would be happy to discuss on the subject with any folks or
organisations willing to contribute or ready to fund ongoing
development.

Best regards,

Thomas Bonfort
Terriscope EURL, Toulouse, France