What is the Map Tiling Service?

The Map Tiling Service dynamically renders subsets of a map on a per-request basis. This subset is called a tile. The tiles rendered from the Map Tiling Service can be used individually, or combined to form larger maps, in applications for seamless map interaction. This service provides fast, simple, light-weight map rendering where more complex map rendering can be performed using the Mapping Service.

This service provides operations that:
  • lists the available tiles
  • describes the metadata for a specific named tile
  • gets tiles based on the input parameters

The Map Tiling Service allows the hosting of multiple maps that can be used to render the tiles. Each map hosted by the Map Tiling Service can have a specific configuration that defines how the map will be used to create tiles.

The built-in pluggable caching mechanism is an important feature of the Map Tiling Service. When this caching is turned on, tiles are stored so serving of tiles to the client is both faster and less resource intensive. This also allows the pregeneration of tiles and pointing the Map Tiling Service to this cache.

The Map Tiling Service has a REST interface. This API is a simplified web interface that has methods for getting the name of maps, describing maps, and getting tiles. For more information, see Map Tiling REST Interface.