[OSM-talk] dojo-style AJAX widget for OSM?

[Tom Carden]

On 29/05/06, Frank O'Dwyer <fod at opencycleroute.org> wrote:
> The latest version of the Dojo toolkit has AJAX widgets that interface
> nicely with google and yahoo maps. How hard would it be to get OSM
> interfacing to the same API?

It's pretty easy to embed an OSM slippy map into any page, but adding
data on top doesn't work with the current tile code (though I've not
looked closely at Nick's fixes yet). I couldn't get map pins
consistently placed - it because we're using a hacky mercator
projection ontop of the civicmaps engine and it wasn't really set up
to do  that.

Steve, Mikel and I started a project called Mapstraction which will
allow people to code things up using a common API on top of
Google/Yahoo/Microsoft data, and switch to OSM (or another provider)
with one line of code www.mapstraction.com - as part of that effort
we'll be bringing the tile code up to scratch I think.

That said, there's been talk of using OpenLayers www.openlayers.org
with OpenStreetMap, since it's much more mature.  When the OpenLayers
folks get their Mercator projection bits out in the open, I imagine
that there'll be pretty quick changeover.  A dojo widget for
OpenLayers would seem to be a natural step if they haven't already
looked into it.

It's likely there'll be some collaboration between Mapstraction and
OpenLayers, to get the best fit possible for OpenStreetMap.  That
might mean we implement our Mapstraction ideas in OpenLayers, or that
we make an OpenLayers adapter for Mapstraction, or something different
- we've not really talked it through yet.  There are a lot of common
goals between the two projects, but the focus is slightly different.

>
> See http://dojotoolkit.org/ - click on "see it in action" and look under
> 'general widgets'
>

Indeed, it's very cool.  We're already hoping to support it using
Mapstraction -

http://www.mapstraction.com/trac/ticket/22
http://www.mapstraction.com/trac/ticket/30

http://www.mapstraction.com/trac/report/3 gives a rundown of all the
things we'd like Mapstraction to support.  You can also consider it to
be a list of things we'd like an OSM javascript API to support :)

Best,

Tom.