Site Administrator Help

About Services

There are seven services: Site, Resource, Drawing, Feature, Mapping, Rendering, and Tile. If you are using a single server, that server performs all of these services. In any case, the site server always handles the first two services, because they handle data access and manage the resources for the site. However, if you have two or more servers, you can split off the other services and allocate them to another server or servers. For example, the Mapping and Rendering services are the most processor-intensive operations and can benefit from having a dedicated server to handle them.

The Site service provides basic site-related functionality, such as enumerating users and creating user sessions.
The Resource service manages repositories and resources.
The Drawing service allows low level access to DWF data stored in a resource repository as part of a drawing source.
The Feature service allows low level access to SDF+ data stored in a resource repository as part of a feature source.
The Mapping service creates the view of a map in response to requests from the clients.
The Rendering service creates the final map image for the AJAX viewer from input provided by the Mapping service.
The Tile service supports smooth pans and zooms in the AJAX viewer.

A typical two-server site might divide up the services like this:

In this example, Mapping and Rendering services are split off and handled by the second server.

To read more about services, see the Developer's Guide.