"Improving OpenStreetMap" on the wiki - and my own ideas

[Shaun McDonald]

I'm add a couple of things.

Overhauling the routes file so that we can use named routes, and the standard show, index, edit etc rather than the current view and list which is non-standard rails and bloats the routes file.

Use of Factories rather than Fixtures.

Shaun

On 26 Feb 2012, at 13:06, Andy Allan wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I found this link on twitter, and I'm surprised there's no
> conversation here on the development list.
> 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Improving_OpenStreetMap
> 
> ... which although the title of the page has an almost infinitely
> large scope, means mostly working on the rails port. When you get past
> some of the flamebait and trolling, there's a few good ideas on this
> page. I'm especially keen to hear that Tom McW is interested in
> exploring javascript for editors - I'd love to see even something
> comparable to halcyon in order to replace the data overlay, and if
> it's possible to make a JS-based editor, there'll probably be good
> stuff we can re-use in the rails port itself.
> 
> I've got my own long list of (rather more prosaic) things that I'd
> like to try with the rails port, so I'll share them here.
> 
> 1) Find a better name for the project! The fact that it's the result
> of porting the ruby version of the website to rails in 200x is only of
> historical interest. We current have "openstreetmap-website" but given
> that it's both a website, and an API, and a bunch of other stuff too,
> I think it could have a catchier name.
> 2) Move to haml for the views. I much prefer it to erb, but I don't
> know what other people think. If we stick with erb, I think many of
> the views can be cleaned up to be more easily readable during
> development
> 3) Fat models, skinny controllers. It's a convention in many rails
> projects to make the controllers as slim as possible, and move more
> logic into the models. See e.g.
> http://therailsway.com/2007/6/1/railsconf-recap-skinny-controllers/
> and related discussions
> 4) Change the way that we do authorization. I've been using
> declartive_auth gem in some other projects, and quite enjoying it. At
> the moment our authorization is buried all over the place (e.g.
> https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/master/app/controllers/user_controller.rb#L415
> ) and I think it would be good to clear things up.
> 5) Move to an authentication gem, like devise. All the
> resend-email-conformation-token stuff that we have is, nowadays, a
> problem that's solved by other people.
> 6) Move osm-entity handling to lib, or even into a separate gem. I
> find myself copying + pasting big chunks of node/way/relation + map
> call code into other rails projects (e.g. snapshot-server) - so it's
> useful, but the rails port isn't exactly a great starting place for
> hacking on something different!
> 7) Undelete api call. I'll just mention it in passing, but we still need one!
> 8) Look again at the test suite. I don't see many tests being written,
> just mainly keeping the same test suite updated for underlying rails
> changes. I'm not sure what's at the root cause of this, but I suspect
> it's not because we have perfectly comprehensive test coverage!
> 
> Now as for when I'll get around to doing any of this myself... :-) Has
> anyone got their own list of things-they-might-do-eventually to share
> too?
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
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