[OSM-dev] Setting up editing interface on www.openstreetmap.org

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at metacarta.com
Mon Nov 27 16:06:38 GMT 2006


Nick --

In order to do editing via a browser, I need one of a few different
choices. They each require different amounts of work on my part, but
before I start looking at cost, I'm interested in what you think the
best way to go about this is.

I have an existing Python CGI script which makes it simple for me to do
editing via the OSM API with my username. In order to have edits be
attributed to the user who made them, I need some access to the user
credentials such that I can reuse them. Unfortunately, it seems like
this access is not possible via anything that is currently set up.

I can modify my Python CGI script so that it will PUT data via an
XMLHttpRequest -- this will ask the user for the login name/passfor
the OSM API when the PUT is committed. This is the minimal effort for
me: I could convert my Python CGI script to do this in something like an
hour. This means putting a small Python script (which would mostly look
like http://labs.metacarta.com/osm/edit.txt) on the OSM server, under
the www.openstreetmap.org domain.

Alternatively, I could modify the script to use the database directly,
rather than the API. Since I don't know Ruby, this would probably be
high cost for relatively little gain, comparitively. (If I had to
rewrite my code to ruby, it would probably simply never happen.)

Essentially, the edit.txt above is a simple attribute editor. It would
let anyone edit the attributes of a way by going to edit.cgi?way=43245,
which I think would be a useful tool to have in general, but I'm not
sure how you feel about putting it under the OSM domain. (Obviously, it
would be placed into SVN and under OSM's control, not mine.)

If I need to demonstrate this functionality on a dev account or
something like that before deploying it, please let me know how I can
obtain one so that I can perform this testing and make your life as
simple as possible.

Could you advise on how you would like this matter to proceed? 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta




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