This project is now called GeoWebCache, and has moved to http://geowebcache.org.

Using GeoServer to serve geographic image tiles directly to a web client (such as OpenLayers) requires substantial computational effort on the server side. Yet, the redundant and largely static nature of the problem makes it an ideal candidate for a cache. Existing naive HTTP caches are often employed, but are not well tailored to the specific needs of WMS image tile requests. One existing WMS-C (Web Mapping Service Caching server) exists: MetaCarta's TileCache. TileCache provides a significant performance improvement for serving map tiles. However, TileCache is typically run using mod_python, an environment that requires much considerable setup in addition to a J2EE deployment of GeoServer. In response to these needs, JTileCache will implement a WMS-C server modeled after TileCache, but written in pure Java. JTileCache will be deployed as standalone web application, allowing it to cache local or remote GeoServer instances. By relying on existing distributed cache frameworks, JTileCache would ease the deployment of multiple caching servers (useful to increase the number of concurrent browser connections), and allow the cache to exist in local memory, on disk, in a database, or distributed across the network.

( My work on this project is sponsored by Google Summer of Code in affliation with the GeoServer project. )