[Tilesathome] New stuff from t at h server land

[spaetz]

The server is back and running. With the API having moved to one of the new machines we seem to be zipping through all requests quite quick now :-)

2 new features:

1) Besides the regular tile detail page (e.g. http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Browse/details/tile/6/34/18/), you can now see the same data in an easily machin-parsable format. This is a request by bobkare. It's called like this: http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Browse/details/tile/6/34/18/?format=short .

bobkare said he might put this in the wiki, if not, it would be cool if someone else did. I am not that good at keeping the wiki up to date.

2)  The server delivers the "tileset filesize" (in bytes) and the "tileset modification date" (as unix timestamp) to the t at h client now when it hands out a request. 
a) Clients can easily use this information to decide whether this tileset is too complex for them (they could then put it back to the server). 
b) The modification time can be used to compare the downloaded API times (time of last change) with the age of the existing tileset file. If the tileset is already newer than the last API change, the client could abort rendering and skip the tileset (would need a special put back to server, so the server deletes the request). This would prevent us from uploading too many tilesets to the server (need to become more efficient to scale with future growth). Ideally the OSM API would have a call that told the client how ol the data in a certain area is, so the client could even skip the downloading of the OSM file. I'd need help with that on the client side.

That's all for now.

spaetz