[josm-dev] Microsoft gains access to aerial imagery

[Frederik Ramm]

Ian,

Ian Dees wrote:
> There seem to be two methods of display that need to be handled: tiled 
> (WMS and Slippymap) and static image (ImageLayer). Could the ImageLayer 
> plugin be made to fit a tiled-image interface without causing too much 
> trouble?

I would be guessing if I said anything, really. I am the original author 
of both the slippy map plugin and the WMS plugin (which rested heavily 
on previous Landsat Plugin work) - but both are now much further 
advanced and I have (blissfully) lost track of the inner workings of 
either. (All I know is that the Yahoo stuff is still a pain, technically.)

I have gone on record in the past saying that JOSM is too bloated (and 
I'd *still* like to have a really lean version from time to time), but 
as background layers go, I am really tempted to suggest that we try to 
hijack one of the existing Open Source GIS packages. gvSig, for example, 
supports most stuff you can think of - shapefiles, AutoCAD, KML, GML, 
GeoTIFF and other raster formats, WMS and WFS servers, direct access to 
spatial databases etc., and it is written in Java. I haven't looked into 
it really but would it not be neat to create an adapter that allowed 
JOSM to display gvSig datasources? Then we could have it all without 
additional effort.

uDig is another popular Open Source GIS, also in Java.

Might be one of those things that only sound good on paper though :)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"