In this section, you'll learn key concepts for tile caching, including tile caching schemes. We'll look at some software options for tile caching, and finally you'll learn about the process associated with the GeoServer tile caching stack that we'll be using in this section.
Tile caching is very useful when you are working with background maps, or for static content that does not change very often or involve much interaction. An example of tile caching is OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/21.2516/86.7343), and you can see tile caching at work as we zoom in and out of the map; portions of the map are pre-rendered as tiles, little images, and then they're stitched together by the frontend OpenLayers client, as shown in the following screenshot:
This allows very complex cartography to be delivered very quickly to our...