GeoWebCache Resources
- GeoWebCache Community Site
- GeoWebCache Source Code
- GeoWebCache Issue Tracker
- GeoWebCache Chat Room
OpenGeo Services
OpenGeo offers GeoWebCache training, including introductory and advanced sessions, as well as GeoWebCache core development to add new features to the project.
Our GeoWebCache Team
Gabriel Roldán
Gabriel has worked on geospatial software since 1997, working on route finding, vehicle tracking, web mapping with ESRI and open source software, desktop editing with uDig, and more.
About GeoWebCache
GeoWebCache sits between any WMS compliant server and tiling clients to accelerate the delivery of images and data by dividing the world in to tiles and caching for fast delivery.
- OGC-compliant Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS), Web Map Service-Caching (WMS-C), Tiled Map Service (TMS)
- Java J2EE application, works with Jetty, Tomcat, WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss
- Ability to serve as a compliant WMS by recombining and resampling tiles to answer arbitrary image requests
- Pre-seeding and seeding-on-demand capability
- Native output to Google Maps (including Google Mobile), Google Earth super overlays (vector and raster), Bing Maps, and Yahoo Maps.
- Fine control over tile expiration by REST API or GeoRSS notification
- Disk quotas with Least Frequently Used (LFU) and Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithms to manage disk space effectively
- Handles WMS requests with time, elevation, alternate styles and filters
GeoWebCache @ OpenGeo
Recent Contributions
OpenGeo funds ongoing development of GeoWebCache as part of our larger mission to make public geodata more accessible and usable to civil society. Recent contributions include:
- Coordination and lead development of GeoWebCache 1.0 and 1.1
- Platform improvements to back cache with JDBC
- Data caching from WFS
- Support for KML Super Overlays in Google Earth
- Developer and User documentation
Core Development Roadmap
Seeding is the process of pre-populating the cache with tiles. Currently a seed request can only take a bounding box. One improvement we could make is to let the seeder take a polygon, which can efficiently delimit the area of interest, saving significant time and bandwidth. Another improvement to be made is depth-first seeding, for cases when the center of the seed is of the most interest.
Several improvements to GeoWebCache could be done to better support clustering for reliability and scalability. While traditional clustering techniques work there are several unique aspects of geospatial cache clustering which can be optimized for directly in the GeoWebCache codebase.
Right now a seeding process can easily overload a server, especially if it is in a live environment also responding to client requests. This could be improved in several ways to queue and prioritize requests so that the GeoWebCache seeder is smart enough to not overload the server.
