WMS/WFS server: am I crazy to write my own?

Question

I'm a "do it yourself" kind of guy, but I want to make sure I'm not going to do myself in by trying to bite off more than I can chew.

I am writing a browser-based mapping application that needs to have the option to run standalone (no internet connection) on the end-user's machine. That is, the application is some kind of server that will, in many cases, get installed on the end user's machine and the browser will point to some localhost URL to access it.

I will be using MapLayers on the client side, and the server side will have a bunch of custom logic specific to the application, such as handling click events on the map in certain custom ways, creating various custom objects on the map at certain times, and so on.

For the "business logic" part of the server, I'm happy using paste/webob with python. It's a simple infrastructure that lets me put all this custom logic in easily.

I had been thinking that the client would communicate with two servers: this paste/webob business logic server, and a server just for serving WMS and WFS map elements. So I was looking at MapServer and GeoServer to handle the map parts and ... I'm not happy.

I'm not happy because I don't want to have to install and worry about a "beast" on the client machines. For MapServer, I don't really want to install a full-blown web server like Apache, and have to deal with CGI and PHP and MapScript. For GeoServer, there's (potentially) installing Java, and dealing with various complexities of the GeoServer setup and administration.

Part of this is simply a learning curve issue. If I can avoid it, I'm not especially interested in learning the intricacies of either MapServer or GeoServer. I installed GeoServer, pointed it to some of my data, and was able to use the MapLayers preview built into GeoServer's nice web admin to view my data. But when I tried to serve the data for real using my own MapLayers web page pointed at GeoServer, I crashed GeoServer. That I could crash the server just be sending some presumably malformed requests from the client was quite surprising to me. And I could dig into the GeoServer logs to try to figure out what I did wrong, but ... I don't really want to spend a lot of time on that.

So, I am considering implementing parts of the WMS and WFS interface myself just using the paste/webob server I already have. It may in fact be that I only need the WMS, since I might handle vector objects through a simple custom protocol that I make to pass data to the client, which can then create and manipulate the objects directly using OpenLayers.

I've looked at the specs and example messages for WMS (and a bit less at WFS). It seems not so difficult just to implement this protocol myself, especially because I have full control of the client in this case -- it's not like I need to be able to act as a generic WMS or WFS server; I just have to make my own OpenLayers client happy.

The two main abilities that I need the WMS server to have are:

• Serve tiles from a store of prerendered tiles that I've created ahead of time (I'll prerender the tiles using OpenStreetMap data and mapnik as the redering engine; and I'll store and access them using the normal Google Maps style tile naming scheme that OpenLayers expects)

• Have the ability to server modified versions of these tiles where certain data that I store locally is drawn on top of the tiles. For instance, I might have, say, 10000 points on one "layer" and 10000 polygons on another layer, and when the user activates these layers I will serve my same base tiles, but as I'm serving these tiles I'll render these additional features on top of them, and probably I'll implement a simple caching scheme to keep these over-rendered tiles around for some amount of time.

So my question is: Even though I know there are existing tools that do these things (MapServer, GeoServer, TileCache, and others), I'm actually feeling like it's less work for me to just to respond to some simple WMS messages, and do this additional over-drawing on my tiles myself in python, making sure everything is projected correctly, etc. I don't need to draw fancy wide streets or anything for these over-layers, just simple lines, icons, and perhaps labels. It sure sounds nice and simple to have a python-only solution.

I figure if I ever need to expand into supporting more of the WMS/WFS protocol, or doing fancier overdrawing, I can just insert MapServer/GeoServer at that time.

Are there pitfalls here I'm not considering?

Answer 1

Mapserver is very easy to setup and learn. Implementing any kind of rendering by yourself is going to require much more effort, and you will probably find a lots of unexpected traps.

mapserver cgi should be enough for your needs. If you require some very specific tweak, then mapscript can be useful.

I think it could be interesting if you could make a pure JavaScript application, and save yourself from installing a web server (and a map server). If you just needed browsing a tile mosaic, may be you could do it just with JavaScript (generate an html table with a cell for each tile). You can render points or polygons, with JavaScript, using a canvas and doing some basic coordinate conversion to translate geographic points to pixels. Openlayers have this functionality, I think.

EDIT: I just checked and with Openlayers you can browse local tiles, and you can render kml and some other vect data. So, I think you should give Openlayers a try.

Answer 2

No need to have a wms/wfs. What you need is a tile implementation. Basically you should have some sort of central service, or desktop service that generates the tiles. Once these tiles are generated, you can simply transform them to your "no-real-webserver-architecture" filesystem. You can create a directory structure that conforms to /{x}/{y}/{z}.png and call it from javascript.

An example of how openstreetmap does this can be found here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers_Simple_Example