Custom Map Tiles (Part 3 - TileStache)

Part 1 - MapCruncher
Part 2 - TileMill
Part 3 - TileStache
Part 4 - Programmatically
Part 5 - Offline maps on iOS

In my previous post all the map tiles were pre-rendered and stored in the filesystem. Although that approach brings more flexibility it also has some disadvantages: storage and time.

Imagine that we want to store tiles for every zoom level covering the whole world. We would be talking probably about Pentabytes of information. Even if we just stored all the zoom levels for some countries it would be probably lots of Terabytes. Space is cheap, but we're talking about a whole new level here.

Probably even worse than the storage, it would take ages to render all of the required tiles. Without enough computational power we could be looking at months (or more) to render all the tiles. 

So, in this post, I'm going to present a realistic alternative: using a Tile Server to generate and cache map tiles on-the-fly. I'm going to use TileStache for this.