Is there a good library for WMS “Tile Servers”?

Question

I am looking for WMS Tile Servers that I can consume with "OpenLayers".

One: Are there any good library / resources online that collate WMS tile servers or where is a good place to start looking? (Street maps & others etc)

Two: Are there any free tile servers available?

Answer 1

In response to your first question:

For base maps, such as Google Maps or the Open Street Map, a good place to start is the OpenLayers Example Showcase. The following is just a subset of the examples that fetch data from Tile Servers:

• All Overlays with Google and OSM
• Base Layers Example
• Bing Example

For each example, right click and use "View Page Source" to see the javascript that loads layers from the servers.

For your second question:

The free map servers I have worked with are:

• MapServer
• GeoServer

In my experience, GeoServer was the easiest to set up quickly due to the fact that it is written in Java.

Answer 2

I don't know of a directory of available (e.g. public) servers that specializes in tiled WMS, but I do know that GeoWebCache is a freely available implementation of a WMS tile server:

http://geowebcache.org/trac

GeoWebCache is released under the Lesser GPL. It works well with Openlayers!

Answer 3

Another alternative is MapProxy which is also written in Python but it released under AGPL 3.0 licence.

It can actually do simple reprojections and layer combining, using PIL(python imaging library) in the background with very good results.

Answer 4

As an alternative to the Java powered GeoWebCache, you can also use TileCache, written in Python:

http://tilecache.org/

It is released under the BSD license and works like a charm with OpenLayers too

Answer 5

In the services departement, there is also MapBox tile servers: http://mapbox.com/tiles