Hi Jody & Andrea,
Thanks to both of you for taking the time to reply. Much appreciated J
I fully understand the reasoning behind GeoServer’s application architecture – very sensible and obviously very efficient.
Our logical architecture is designed to split channel functionality (such as B2B and B2C interfaces) from business logic and data access. Due to our (some would argue overly) complex physical network architecture (with outer and inner DMZ), components cannot communicate with each other if they are not in the correct part of the network. My original idea (and the reason behind the question) was the hope that the services offered by GeoServer, such as WFS and WMS, could be offered on the outer layer (channel) and the data access and customisation could be offered on the inner layer (business logic and data).
Obviously this was more pie-in-the-sky than actual design, but it was worth a shot 
We now have a way around this… but thanks again for taking the time to reply.
I’m sure I’ll have more questions in the future
Thanks,
Dave Ankers
ESG Architecture, Information Systems
Land Registry, Seaton Court, Plymouth, PL6 5WS, UK
x: 64635
t: 0300 0064635
e: dave.ankers@…2665…
From: Jody Garnett [mailto:jody.garnett@…403…]
Sent: 15 February 2011 12:35
To: Ankers, David
Cc: geoserver-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Geoserver-devel] Splitting the atom… (or just the GeoServer WAR)
Interesting question; usually people split geoserver into separate machines in order to load balance. A lot of time has spent getting GeoServer close physically to the data in order to be efficient; there is no distribution between the data reading library and the GeoServer code using it to handle web feature server request. Literally as each feature is read out of the database the xml is being generated.
If you had to (say for a security setup?) is set up cascading wms in order to have a front end geoserver talk to a backend geoserver that actually draws the pictures.
–
Jody Garnett
There are inefficient ways to do it (wfs-cascading for example) and there could be more efficient ways to do it that still need to be created.
It would be interesting to know why you’d got for such an architecture though, normally people create clusters in order to get higher performance and availability, this kind of split instead may increase the points of failure and certainly reduce efficiency
Cheers
Andrea
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