As part of our continuing efforts to make geographic information in the world more readily accessible, MetaCarta Labs seeks to make accessing the existing geographic information in the world faster and easier.
One of the primary complaints about WMS is its speed, especially with regard to tiling clients web clients like OpenLayers. A usable web service must scale to demand, but rendering dozens of WMS requests per second *on the fly* is not a reasonable expectation for most hosts: it's easier to just not deliver the data at all. In order to improve the scalability of Open Source mapping on the Web, MetaCarta Labs has developed a tool we call TileCache. TileCache acts as a buffer between your WMS server and its clients. It accepts WMS requests constrained by scale and bounding box (i.e., WMS-C, as described by the OSGeo WMS Tiling Client Recommendation[1]), and returns images that can be viewed in clients such as OpenLayers. TileCache also supports the OSGeo Tile Map Service Specification[2], and requests in the format supported by the WorldWind 3D globe client. TileCache is written in cross-plaform Python, and is distributed by MetaCarta under the BSD license by MetaCarta. In the simplest use case, TileCache requires only write access to a disk, the ability to run Python CGI scripts, and a WMS you want to be cached. Running in Apache on a properly configured mod_python, TileCache can support hundreds of requests for cached tiles per second with minimal load. TileCache also supports local caching on disk, as well as distributed caching systems like memcached or mogilefs. TileCache comes with utilities for pre-caching layers at specified zoom levels and areas of interest. We hope you find TileCache useful, and look forward to any feedback you might have. TileCache Demo: http://labs.metacarta.com/wms-c/demo.html TileCache Information: http://labs.metacarta.com/wms-c/ TileCache 1.2 Download: http://labs.metacarta.com/wms-c/tilecache-1.2.tar.gz TileCache changelog: http://labs.metacarta.com/wms-c/tilecache-1.2.tar.gz/CHANGELOG Questions, comments, or suggestions on TileCache can be directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/WMS_Tiling_Client_Recommendation [2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Tile_Map_Service_Specification Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
