[OSM-dev] Ruby developers in Amsterdam

[Richard Fairhurst]

Matt Amos wrote:
> in the case of quadtile, i think the extra complexity was 
> worthwhile. in the case of SQL in the amf_controller, i'm not 
> so sure. this is just my opinion.

Sure. We can even do more nuanced than that, if you like. :)

In my opinion - and again, just that - the clarity of Rails is worthwhile
and important in the write operations. putway is a lot more readable in
Rails than it ever was in raw SQL, and it's more reassuring in terms of data
integrity, too. Speed isn't really an issue here as these are called
comparatively rarely.

Where the raw SQL approach scores is in the read operations, which are
incredibly simple, easy-to-understand queries. In Potlatch these are
whichways and getway, in the XML API it'd be the /map call. The disadvantage
of using Rails in this context is obviously that you have this huge overhead
to create objects for every way or node, simply to serialise them and
dispose of the objects immediately. Because they're reads, there are
(generalising a bit) no integrity issues: and because they're very common
calls, you get a significant speedup.

cheers
Richard
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