[OSM-dev] Thanks

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Thanks for all the answers. Much appreciated. I was asking because it seems
> that you guys are reasonably short on developers. 

Maybe even "seriously short" ;-)

> Myself and a friend are
> interested in helping out on OSM and are both experienced C++ developers -
> and were wondering if there were any discrete projects that might benefit
> from our experience. 

If you do UI stuff then build a good OSM editor for mobile devices, or 
help the Merkaartor folks who have a good product.

If you're really adventurous then re-implement the whole server API in 
C++ - it's not a big deal, you can leave the UI stuff in Rails, just get 
the stuff from 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Protocol_Version_0.5 (some 
extensions described at the same URL with 0.6 in the back) working as an 
Apache module. That would be really great because Rails sucks 
magnificently (performance-wise) when it comes to creating a few 
thousand Node objects on the fly just to serialize them into an XML 
stream (personal opinion only). The API is likely to be a focal point 
(a.k.a. bottleneck) of OSM for some time to come, so any performance 
boost in that department would be most welcome. It's not that we suffer 
from it as it stands but its use will only increase in the future.

(You have my support for that if you need it.)

Bye
Frederik