David,

You might be able to create a precaching script, which requests "tiles" from your current mapserver and saves them some place. Once the tiles are fetched, you can setup your tile index on them. You can automate that too. Then in another map file -- say, "wms_proxy.map" -- you could have a layer that uses your tiles index.

This is a decent approach if your WMS clients only need the GetMap operation. Obviously the WMS proxy service won't handle GetFeatureInfo or GetCapabilities requests quite as well. To help with manage the other requests, you might want to put a script with some custom logic in front of both .map files to accept the WMS requests. If it's for GetMap, forward the request to your new proxy map URL. If it's for other operations, forward to your original map URL.

Brock

David Bitner wrote:

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?

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