New map API: Simple Tiles... any use to anyone ?

[Redrobes]

Oh ok, I thought they had some kind of set of PCs rendering out the vector data and would serve up the image. As I read it they were saying that there exists these huge databases of vector data and they had some kind of capability of interpreting it to tiles and you grab the tiles. So you have to host that capability as well then. Re-reading the article with your additional explanation does give me a different impression now. So I guess this is more of a C or Ruby based simple API with limited scope for what would already exist in a more extensive fashion, if you could be bothered to set it all up, but either way, your server will do all of the image rendering and generate the tile. Possibly still useful but it sounds like you will still need to run a server and still need to download the multi gigs of vector data to make it work.

Thanks Hai b.t.w...

[Hai-Etlik]

Oh ok, I thought they had some kind of set of PCs rendering out the vector data and would serve up the image. As I read it they were saying that there exists these huge databases of vector data and they had some kind of capability of interpreting it to tiles and you grab the tiles. So you have to host that capability as well then. Re-reading the article with your additional explanation does give me a different impression now. So I guess this is more of a C or Ruby based simple API with limited scope for what would already exist in a more extensive fashion, if you could be bothered to set it all up, but either way, your server will do all of the image rendering and generate the tile. Possibly still useful but it sounds like you will still need to run a server and still need to download the multi gigs of vector data to make it work.

Thanks Hai b.t.w...

Oh you don't need a massive data set. The point is that it is capable of dealing with one if you need it to. If you have a 10 GiB spatial table in Postgres, it can render that, but if you have a 10 KiB Shapefile, it can render that too. But then so can GeoServer. The difference is that GeoServer is a complete server with support for WFS and WCS as well as WMS and TMS, written in Java, and supporting the SDL style language, where Simple Tiles is a C library with multiple language bindings that only supports tiled services and has no complex rule based style system. It's probably a fair bit faster and less memory intensive in its particular role than GeoServer.

Now, if you want a cloud based map tile rendering service, there are some. CloudMade is a prominent one with ties to OpenStreetMap.