Using the tile cache

In the previous section, you learned how to create a tile-backed app using OpenLayers. In this section, we'll take a deeper dive into using the tile cache. We'll start by viewing the app we created in the last section in the browser. Next, we'll send a request for a tile generated by the app, but this time with the command-line utility curl. Finally, you'll learn about seeding and rendering the tile cache.

Here is the OpenLayers app that we created in the previous section:

 

We'll use Developer tools from the browser again to see a URL for a particular tile, and then see what that looks like in curl. You can see we have tile requests here to OpenStreetMap, and also to our GeoServer instance:

I'll just grab one of these link addresses, URLs, and then, moving over into the command line, if we already have curl installed, we can use the curl command with the-vswitch for verbose output, so we can see information that will be useful for debugging:

C:\Users\mearns>curl -v

Then...