[OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] The future of Potlatch

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 06:56:40AM +0100, Lester Caine wrote:
> SteveC wrote:
> > On 2 May 2008, at 12:38, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> >> Some things don't require referential integreity: selecting ways/nodes
> >> within a bounding box can't hurt the referential integrity of the
> >> database (so long as the code is well-maintained), so the harm in
> >> converting those methods (which are probably the single most  
> >> performance
> >> important aspect of Potlatch?) to SQL is relatively low, so far as I  
> >> can
> >> tell...
> > 
> > One of the other reasons for moving to rails was the holy grail of  
> > using postgres, and rails is theoretically db independent. Of course  
> > it didn't work out that way.
> 
> Main problem here is the lack of good 'GIS' in other databases. It looks like 
> I may be forced to move the gis data to a postgres database despite the fact 
> that I have had all other systems running Firebird/Interbase for 15 years :(

But the backend of OSM matters little, in that case. You could say, in
the same way, that OSM should be topographical (instead of topological)
because databases don't support topology well. But that doesn't make
sense: OSM is an API designed to allow people to collect the data: Not a
GIS system designed to allow people to interact with the data with GIS
tools. That aspect of it can easily come on top of OSM.

> > On the specific point, I'm all for more speedy SQL on things like that  
> > so long as there is a rails logic way too - in much the same way as  
> > there apparently is with the tileid stuff. Then if things change  
> > significantly (like, say with changesets, rollback, spatial data  
> > types) we don't have limited options.
> 
> Rails may be nice for some, but for those of us how are coding other 
> applications daily without any reference to rails it is a turn off. 

This is true in *any* language. There's nothing that everybody knows how
to code for: Rails is popular, so this is much less true than in the
days before the server was written in Ruby.

> I do not have the time to bother even looking which is a reason that I
> have not been able to contribute on that side.  I work with raw data
> via SQL and will continue that way with 25 years of C++ applications
> and now increasingly PHP.  So any extensions I come up with ( such as
> NLPG data interface ) will be in PHP :)

Which is fine: it just means that you don't hack on OSM.org. This is
true of the majority of OSM contributors and developers.  

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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