Re: Deeper Zoom

Will,

I missed your post before, and wanted to take some time answering your
questions, so here we go:

Will wrote:
> Am
> I assuming correctly that this basically means you can put one large
> image file on a server and the MapServer software will serve up slices
> for you?
Yes, mapserver does the slicing on the fly based on the the latitudes
and longitudes of the corners of the box you want displayed. This is
just part of the WMS standard.

You can get the full spec for WMS from OGC's website:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/
Here's the code to go from Google's x, y, zoom to a WMS request url.
http://blog.kylemulka.com/?p=296
Here's the Mapserver WMS Server HOWTO:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/wms_server

> Does this add a lot of overhead to the server to make the
> slices on the fly like this?
Yes, it adds a large amount of overhead if you don't do any caching.

> Is serving indiividual tile
> images still faster, and if so, can you automatically cache the tiles?
I do automatically cache my tiles using PHP with the PEAR Cache_Lite
Package. More details here:
http://blog.kylemulka.com/?p=293