[OSM-dev] Tirex vs Renderd

[Jochen Topf]

Hi!

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 10:21:31AM +0100, Kai Krueger wrote:
> with the recent appearance of tirex there are now at least two, with the 
> python version of renderd 3, but probably more implementations of a 
> rendering backend. All attempt to roughly do the same, i.e. take 
> requests from a webserver or other program and render them. So the 
> question is what is the future outlook for each and the relation between 
> them? I.e. is tirex supposed to replace renderd and tile.osm.org will 
> eventually switch? Or was tirex just something geofabrik threw together 
> for a particular client and renderd should remain the "default"? Are 
> they intended to solve the same problem and "compete for the same 
> market" or does each have their own niche for which they are optimized for?
> 
> This is less of a question though regarding using renderd vs tirex but 
> more of a question of where the future lies and thus for which to 
> develop new features. It would be a shame and rather inefficient to put 
> in effort to develop features for something that turns out to be a dead 
> end and my concern is to "fracture" the not directly large pool of 
> developers for renderd/tirex.
> 
> Yes, sometimes competition can be a good thing and thanks to it all 
> being opensource one can fork and merge at will, but I would be 
> interested to hear how others involved see the situation and help 
> potential contributors to make a informed decision to which project best 
> to contribute to.

As one of the two primary developers of Tirex, I am - of course - biased,
so take this with a grain of salt:

I think that for most uses Tirex is the better and more flexible platform. Of
course I would say that because we specifically started this prject because of
the inflexibilities we saw in mod_tile/renderd that we wanted to address.

Currently Tirex is in "production" use at tile.openstreetmap.de (Tile server
mostly used on www.openstreetmap.de) and on the development server
dev.openstreetmap.de (used for the topo.openstreetmap.de) and of course at
Geofabrik. At least one other person is using it, as far as I know. This is
still a very small user base.

We are still actively working on Tirex (currently I am working on provisions
to allow different rendering backends and make working with different styles
easier), but we need more developers in the long run. Its by no means a
stable Open Source project yet. There is quite a lot of documentation, but
not enough yet and whats there is hard to find. Thats on my todo list, too.

So while renderd is older and used in more places, Tirex is more flexible and
in more active development currently (as far as I can see). Hard to tell where
this is going, but I recommend going with Tirex. :-)

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298