[OSM-talk] The OSM Applet - let's ditch it for JOSM (was: Mapping Reading, some impressions)

[Tom Carden]

On 05/09/06, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
> Mikel wrote:
>
> > One advantage to the applet is that it display everyone's collected
> > GPS traces. (When the tile server is responsive of course)
>
> Agreed. Since you can get GPS traces from the API anyway (and,
> inevitably, the Flash editor has its own private API for speed) it
> needn't be dependent on tile.
>

Just a heads up: the applet used to do this, and it was unworkable.
You're relying on the API being able to feed you manageable chunks of
GPS data... something I'm not sure it can do efficiently.  That's why
we went for cached images of GPS data instead - all those images are
slow to generate and fetch, but they can be reused.  Of course, if the
API provides GPS, it would be nice to do it per person, and most
recent first, and perhaps think about how it could relate to the
public traces (will those have an API too?).

Best,

Tom.