[OSM-dev] JOSM patches applied and suggestion for plugin environment?

[Immanuel Scholz]

Hi,


Today, I applied the patches sent by you so far. Sorry for the delay ;)

Ovidiu: The translation should be there, the wrongly spelled english
sentence is also fixed. There are some new sentences with the other
patches, so keep up the good work! :-)

Rob: I modified your customize-line-drawing patch a bit to allow 3 states:
on, off and "use what is the global setting" (effectivly removing the
customization from the preferences). Thanks for the "remaining" 80% of
code I used from your submission ;)

Dean: I applied your modify-ways-when-deleting-nodes patch (except that I
inverted an if statement to break on the most probable solution first ;-).
But should not be noticable anyway.)  Thanks to you too. However, I
couldn't close ticket 270 due an internal server error on the
trac-machine...

Jon: Your both patches (selecting the new node after it gets added and
sorting geo-tagged images and points after time) are applied. Look at my
changes to your second patch to feel the power of generics in Java5 ;-D.
Thanks to you for your effort.


So, after all this thanks, and after reading about all your great plans to
help hacking on JOSM, I'd like to whether you (=future JOSM coders ;) like
to have a plugin system for some addins to add to JOSM or if you prefer to
hack the code directly.

Cool with plugins is, that end-user can easily abandon unwanted plugins
and that the code is somewhat organized in modules (which may help
organize the coders mind too ;), but this comes at the cost of an overhead
in complexity (for the JOSM main code and the plugin code).
Also, plugins tend to be restricted in what they can change. The plugin
coder will have some kind of "insertion points" to plug extensions into
JOSM and this may restrict the scope of action of the plugin. (As example
it is not possible to make JOSM 1.4 compatible with a plugin ;)

Of course, the coolest advantage of plugins is, when it comes to add
non-Java stuff as plugin, which is probably much easier than direct
integration into JOSM.... ;-)  (already planned for osm-filter.pl but
postponed due lack of time.. :(  )

Ideas? Comments? Flames?
Any experiences with plugin system design?
Would anyone be interested in writing plugins at all? (Nick?)

Ciao, Imi