WMS and The Tile Server
Date: 03/03/2010 – recorded on paper records
The issue of the tile server has been niggling at us for a while and we have now found a resolution. We will use an open source WMS application called GeoServer, which has an inbuilt caching system called GeoWebCache.
Geoserver will plug into all our data sources and create map images on request from my API, returning a link to the image created. GeoWebCache will cache all requests to the WMS software, thus create a tile server type system. This situation is a perfect solution as only the areas needed on a regular basis will be cached thus resolving the space issues we had in the tile server scenario.
The time issue is also solved as the cache is built up over time.
We are concerned about the speed of first request but hope to cache all widely used datasets before we go live.
