[OSM-dev] New renderer... move to Ruby/rmagick?

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone (and particularly Steve and Mikel),

Am aiming to switch focus from osmeditor2 back to the new renderer 
(nick.dev) this week.

First thing to do will be to make the existing PHP code WMS compliant 
(i.e. no need to pass zoom into the renderer) so that it's ready to go 
live on the real OSM server. Will allow everyone to see how IOW tagging is 
going for one thing :-)

After that I would like to attempt to tackle two of the issues with the 
renderer at higher zoom levels -- round caps, and antialiasing, neither of 
which are supported by PHP/GD.

I am considering switching to Ruby/rmagick for the following reasons:

- it appears to support both these features
- the speed concerns I had about Ruby for the contours would not be 
applicable if the contour generation code went into its own WMS layer. 
i.e. the contour drawing code could remain in PHP.
- better integration with existing Ruby database code
- enables me to learn a new language properly... :-)

I guess "suck it and see" is the key thing but does moving to Ruby/rmagick 
raise any alarm bells? I'd guess at the moment the SQL is the rate 
determining step rather than the scripting language.

Thanks,
Nick