In OpenLayers, is there any way to convert polygons to tiles?

Question

I have a OpenLayers map which by enabling a feature by user, a very huge table of polygons (lots of small areas, with information and metadata for each) will appear on the map, which rendering this big amount of data is very slow and zooming in and out is kind of miserable.

Do you know any solution to this problem?

I was thinking of converting these polygons to tiles, which of course if possible, will not show any information for areas. But when the user reaches a certain zoom level, map starts showing information for areas, in case that area is being clicked by user. What I mean is behaving like tiles before a certain zoom level, and after that, behaving like polygons.

I will appreciate any suggestion to the problem itself, or to my (maybe crazy) proposed idea.

Answer 1

You can e.g. use a WMS server like GeoServer for dynamic tile generation, or use something like MapTiler for static tiles. The "Combine OGC Services Wisely" section on http://ol-performance.appspot.com/ should give you an idea on how to combine local vector rendering with tiles.