Hello! I am looking to build an online map page/app/site that will display the map in a number of different projections. Not just changing the geoid/datum, but changing the actual projection itself. (aside: virtually every online map use Mercator - I see the sample on the Openlayers home page uses a different cylindrical projection, as does MapQuest, I wish to be more adventurous with conics, pseudo-cylindricals, etc - the exact projection(s) have yet to be decided)
I know you can adjust the projection with MapServer & OpenLayers (with proj4js), so I will probably take this approach and use TileCache to help reduce server loads. The basemap will remain unchanged, so instead of using WMS (or a similar on-demand service), is it possible to create a set of tile files ahead of time, and "serve" these simply by exposing the tile directory hierarchy on a webserver? From what I have found on the OpenLayers site, it looks like this is possible, but can this be done with an arbitrary projection? How can the tiles be produced? The advantage of doing this is that it is quicker (Apache/etc simply has to serve a file rather than run an application), and the tiles can also be distributed using Amazon S3 / CloudFront (faster still, and easier to keep costs&performance under control). I have been able to do this quite effectively using MapCruncher and Bing/Virtual Earth. It would great if I could also do it for arbitrary projections and with OpenLayers. The primary purpose of these maps is as a demo for a series of articles I'm going to write for GeoWebGuru.com. It started as an opinion piece, and now I feel I should "put my money where my mouth is" and actually implement something! It may simply serve as a low bandwidth demo and example for how-to articles. However I intend it to have some utility, so I want to be able to handle higher traffic loads without being cut off or charged by my webhost! Richard Marsden http://www.winwaed.com http://www.mapping-tools.com http://www.geowebguru.com _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/users
