OWL status / OWL-powered History tab/sidebar

[Paweł Paprota]

Hi all,

In the past month some interesting things have happened in the world of 
OWL. Just some highlights:

* OWL test instance found a new home[1]; big thanks to Matt and Tom for 
the support. This server allows me to do a lot of things that were not 
possible previously due to resource constraints.

* owlviewer web application[2] is available - big thanks to Mapbox folks 
(Saman and Alex) for kicking off the UI part of owlviewer. I have been 
adding a lot of stuff to this application to test the OWL API so it does 
suffer from feature-itis a bit :-)

* I updated the wiki page[3] to reflect the current status of the project.

And last but not least (and probably most on-topic point for rails-dev@):

* Last weekend I started working on the owl-history-tab branch of the 
Rails Port. You can find it at http://owl.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/.

It is in very early stages but the core functionality is there, so you 
can click on the History tab and you should get a sidebar with 
changesets that directly affect visible map area.

I would like to get some feedback about the UI. I went with the sidebar 
as I felt like it gives more "interactive" feel to the website and also 
there is really no value added by loading a separate page with History 
on it - the same thing can be done in a sidebar. It has also some nice 
side-effects like there is more space for the map. And it is dynamic so 
you don't have to go back to the map to change the area and then again 
go into the History tab to see changes.

Anyway, it is just an idea, it's not a lot of work to change it to a 
separate page at this point.

I intend to add couple more features - RSS feed (it is in owlviewer and 
the API supports it) and ability to see more details about a specific 
changeset, possibly even see its full geometry (as owlviewer does it at 
zoom level 16).

Let me know what you think.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/zark
[2] http://owl.openstreetmap.org/
[3] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OWL_(OpenStreetMap_Watch_List)

Paweł