Reflect vs OWS Requests

So, what's the difference? OWS is a formal standard that must be adhered to for proper results. Reflect is a non-standard service initialized with reasonable values, where possible, when required values are omitted.

Reflect makes life a whole lot easier. It will accept WMS and WFS requests. I've shamelessly taken the idea from geoserver and recreated it here. The single biggest advantage is sizing images. For WMS you are required to pass a height and width value, as well as a bounding box. The problem comes when trying to match the aspect ratio of your bounding box to the image dimensions. Without calculating it first you almost certainly end up with a pinched or squashed image. The calculation is trivial, but a pain having to do it every time, for every image size.

Give reflect a height or width only and the missing dimension will be calculated with the proper aspect ratio, regardless of input SRS. Reflect will also use popular settings if omitted. Following is an example.

Reflect example:

OWS example:

   http://gis.postholer.com/services/reflect?
      layers=stateLines,trace
      &trail_id=2
      &height=300
      &t_srs=EPSG:900913
      &bbox=-126,24,-66,50

   http://gis.postholer.com/services/ows?
      service=WMS
      &request=GetMap
      &version=1.1.1
      &layers=stateLines,trace
      &trail_id=2
      &srs=EPSG:900913
      &bbox=-14026255.8,2753408.1,-7347086.4,6446275.8
      &format=image/png
      &height=300
      &width=300

Another feature of reflect is the t_srs value. This will take your bounding box in lat/lon format and transform it to the t_srs SRS. This is handy for creating EPSG:900913 images (square pixels) while doing a conversion from your lat/lon to the image SRS. Lat/lon is assumed to be EPSG:4269. For reflect the default service=WMS and default request=GetMap.

That's it!