[OSM-dev] Xapi alternative

[Andy Allan]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Antoine Pichon <antoine.pich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody
>
> First post here .... and a few questions to ask :-)

Welcome.

> 1/ is there any other possibility instead of xapi to do that ?

You can download the planet file, filter it and get your own results.
You probably don't want to go through all that hassle, but it is
possible.

> 2/ the problem with xapi is that servers are quite always down or
> overloaded or i don't know what ! at least not reliable. Does anybody
> know if it is a temporary problem and should be fixed some day ? And
> what is the problem exactly ?

The root cause is that very few (~1) people know how to write code in
the language that the current XAPI is written in. That makes it harder
for people to help with development, and harder set up and manage the
servers too, and the volunteer who set up the main xapi server is
working on other projects right now so things have hit a bit of a
bottleneck.

> 3/ i read in newsletter recent archive that some people were
> considering hosting their own xapi server and even rewriting xapi
> itself.
> Wouldn't it be much easier to add xapi features to basic api ?
> And actually, I am just wondering why it has not been done already. Is
> it on purpose ? or a technical reason ? or just nobody had the time to
> do it ?

It's on purpose. The editing API (you call it the basic api) is for
the core features needed for editing the map only. It's a policy
decision that cool alternatives like xapi should run independently of
the main servers, rather than continually adding more and more
features to the main editing API. This allows people to run their own
copies of the read-only servers for their own projects, and other
groups to run and maintain xapi-style services independently, and lets
the sysadmins concentrate on the core services.

> 4/ rewriting xapi ? Why not, if i can help... (i know c, sql ...).

Great. There's some people working on the xapi-servlet program at
https://github.com/iandees/xapi-servlet . You could help them out with
development, testing, documentation and all that kind of thing.

> But hosting my own server would be really much more complicate (money,
> bandwidth ....)

Don't worry about that too much, we have hardware earmarked for these
purposes when the code is ready and working.

Cheers,
Andy