Now that we know what a cascaded service is, the big question on our mind is how we might go about using this in the enterprise environment. Well, the short answer is that it can be used in many ways. The more specific answer, on the other hand, is that there are three core scenarios where GeoServer can be used as a proxy using cascaded services:
Extending the capabilities of another WMS server
WMS enabling a WFS-only server
As a reverse proxy
The capabilities of a WMS server are very much dependent on the way they have been configured to run. For example, a configuration might have been configured to only support one spatial reference system, EPSG:27700, for British National Grid. Let's suppose that you have a web application that will benefit from using the data provided by this server, but your application has been configured to work only with Web Spherical Mercator (EPSG:3857). How can you get hold of this WMS data in...