A closer look at three specific tools and techniques
In the final three chapters of this book, we will build a complete sophisticated geospatial web application called ShapeEditor. The ShapeEditor is built on top of a number of existing technologies; before we can start implementing it, we need to become familiar with these technologies. In this section, we will learn about three of the key tools and techniques used to implement the ShapeEditor: the Tile Map Service protocol, OpenLayers, and GeoDjango.
The Tile Map Service protocol
The Tile Map Service (TMS) protocol defines the interface for a web service that returns map tile images upon request. The TMS protocol is similar to WMS, except that it is simpler and more oriented towards the storage and retrieval of map tiles rather than arbitrarily-specified complete maps.
The TMS protocol uses RESTful principles, which means that the URL used to access the web service includes all of the information needed to complete a request. Unlike WMS...
