[OSM-talk] Freemap in Mercator

Ben Gimpert ben at somethingmodern.com
Wed Jul 5 09:18:55 BST 2006


On Tue,  4 Jul 06 @12:07pm, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> Well, I spent a total of about 20 hours trying to work out how the
> OpenStreetMap "WMS" works, and I spent an hour setting up the data in
> Mapserver. I think the only thing that really requires persistence is
> working with the current server-side code: Using the API is actually
> really easy (so long as you're querying specific items: querying for a
> map?bbox call was too slow to be useful at the time), but writing code
> that is suitable for committing to OpenStreetMap SVN is not easy.
> 
> Redoing what OSM has done for rendering in Mapserver is way easier -- 
> but it depends on working against a static data dump, which is not 
> appropriate for the homepage given the current frequency of these 
> dumps. (Steve seems to think this may be changing in the near future.)

Firstly, your Mapserver / OSM integration rocks.

But your effort estimates are so much in the eyes of the beholder!  I
guarantee I would initially be like a monkey doing a math problem trying
to make heads-or-tails of the Mapserver code (20 hours), while OSM's
server-side Ruby seems cake in comparision (1 hour).

Man!  My apologies to the non-native English speakers for the (count
'em) four idiomatic metaphors in that last paragraph...

		Ben






More information about the talk mailing list