I'm building a site that involves a couple of editable vector layers drawn on top of a landbase. In development, I've been working with a publicly accessible WMS, but that won't fly for our production system. I need more control of what features will be displayed at which resolutions. So I need to set up a landbase server, that I can access from OpenLayers.
We're planning to start with the Tiger data. The question is how best to host it. Our previous systems used KaMap layers, creating tiles with MapServer, from shape files. The performance has only been barely acceptable, and the configuration has been a constant headache. So, I'm looking for alternatives. It looks to me like we've three decisions to make. 1st, the access method - the OpenLayers layer type. WMS? WFS? WMS-T? KaMap, again? We'd like to have some ability to query features, which we don't have with KaMap, but not at the cost of performance. 2nd, the data store. Mapserver and shape files have been fairly slow, for us, so we're thinking about using a GIS database. PostGIS is free, we have a license that would allow us to use Microsoft's new GIS capabilities in SqlServer. 3rd, the actual serving application. KaMap acts as its own server. If we decide on WMS, using a PostGIS database, what Open Source options are there for WMS server applications? I have a vague understanding that MapServer can be configured to run as a WMS server. How well does it work? How does it perform? Does PostGIS have a WMS-serving capability? SqlServer? Discussion?
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