I played around with shapefiles and geoserver last year this are two blogposts I wrote back then  

The first one shows how to display and zoom/pan the shapefiles, the second one shows how 

to project a map to a sphere. The shapefiles could come from various sources, as far as i know 

you can export osm data to shapefiles.

http://www.local-guru.net/blog/2009/09/07/projecting-gis-data-on-a-sphere-using-processing

Thanks for this it's an interesting project and could help me with something else I'm attempting, but it doesn't look particularly useful for my application.  I need street level maps, and bringing them in as tiles would be a great solution.  Has anyone seen any processing applications with maps in them recently? Tom Carden mentions in his example PDE for MM... 

// This is a test of the interactive Modest Maps library for Processing
// the modestmaps.jar in the code folder of this sketch might not be 
// entirely up to date - you have been warned!

Does anyone know where i could get an update of modestmaps.jar? I've already used google to find some slightly more recent versions, but nothing that is even nearly parallel to the official MM development.

thanks

Jim

http://www.geowebcache.org/trac and http://tilecache.org/

Both provide the tiling functionality serverside and the geowebcache even supports rejoining the tiles for 

clients that don't support tiling. geowebcache is a javaproject and requires a tomcat to run, tilecache is a 

python project as far as i know