[Openstreetmap-dev] ticket 134

[Mikel Maron]

Thanks Lars. I do share your frustration with the limbo state of OpenStreetMap lately, and hope we can push through, start realizing the potential of this great project.

> I have absolutely zero experience of Ruby, which is one reason for 
> my staying out of software development here.  My assumption is 
> that Ruby is just as fine as Perl, Python or PHP, and that any 
> language is fine as long as the programmers like it.  Steve seems 
> to like Ruby, and so do many other smart people, which makes me 
> doubt that there could be anything fundamentally wrong with it.  
> My own background is in C, C++, Java, and Perl, so I wouldn't mind 
> a migration to Perl.  But I think you would need pretty hard 
> evidence to (convince Steve to) abandon Ruby.

I had no experience with Ruby before OpenStreetMap. It hasn't been that hard to pick up, having a copy of the "pickaxe" book has helped me understand what it's about. It is rather nice and concise, and very good for multi-developer web projects, and there's no reason to abondon Ruby on OpenStreetMap. However, for some jobs, Ruby isn't well suited -- like the heavy iterative number crunching required in drawing tiles. My understanding is that everything in Ruby is an object, and every function a method -- even addition! So every math operation actually requiries a function lookup, and that gets pretty inefficient fast.

For the tiling, ideally the iterative number crunching and drawing would be in C; the Perl was just a quick trial. I haven't done it myself, but Ruby can call C code with SWIG (as it does with ImageMagick). We want to keep portions of the Ruby code, so that SQL isn't duplicated. C code to do the tile generation would be awesome here.


As an aside, ideally tile generation would happen in a background process and cached -- you'd never have a tile request from the slippy map or editor hitting the database. But that would require a bit more infrastructure than currently available.


> Thank YOU!  You may now sign off ticket 134 as solved.

Cool, marked resolved.

-Mikel





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