I use a number of WMS services for displaying imagery both for local client applications and for inclusion in Mapserver. A lot of times these services are slow or require an additional step of projecting that slows them down a lot.
The idea I have is to create an application that sits in front of Mapserver (working as a WMS) and takes a request for a map and automatically splits the request into tiles that fit a shapefile with tiles for different scale ranges. Once the tiles are there, it would then call mapserver on the shapefile index to generate the image to go back to the client. It would basically act much in the same way as Ka-Map only completely on the server side. Has anyone ever done anything like this? Does what I am proposing make any sense? Any ideas on different ways to implement something like this?
