To become a more flexible cache, GeoWebCache should be able to respond to any WMS request, not just ones that line up with the tiles in the cache. This should be quite possible by borrowing some techniques from the raster world, for combining tiles together and sub-sampling up or down to match the resolution. This will often look less than stellar for vector data in tiles, in particular text, but should work for many types of background data.
A few improvements will allow GeoWebCache to act as a normal WMS services. It will take some additions to the configuration system, to control how and when to recombine tiles. Also needed is code to determine the best zoom level and a mechanism to recombine tiles, making use of advanced image processing code like native JAI when available. GeoWebCache should also be able to produce a proper GetCapabilities document for standard WMS clients to operate transparently against it.
Funding
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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.
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.
Funded: GeoWebCache does a great job caching static datasets and these improvements help make it a more active cache.