[Tilesathome] Osmarender strength points?

[D Tucny]

2009/4/10 Mario Ferraro <fadinlight at gmail.com>

> Hi to all :)
>
> You know, I love Osmarender/Tiles at Home, having worked with them for
> Osmarender Frontend during SoC08, doing MyTaH Firefox extension and now
> beginning to develop a or/p porting in JavaScript (or/js, not yet
> completed and with many bugs to fix :), but live example can be found
> here[0], Firefox 3.0 required... thanks thousands times to Frederik for
> guidance :)), to verify if, also thanks to TraceMonkey, the new JS
> engine Firefox 3.5 will have, we can achieve faster rendering times in
> the browser beyond the XSLT.


I'm not sure why, but it gives me a grey filled box here in firefox 3.0.8
under OR/JS, IMAGE and CANVAS show nothing, and if I click Encode as PNG I
get new OR/JS sections under them with grey filled boxes... Is this one of
the remaining bugs? :) or is something else needed in addition to firefox
that I don't have?


>
>
> What I was trying to figure out is, beyond my own love :), what are the
> reasons why an user should choose Osmarender, for example, to browse the
> slippy map. Mapnik maps, e.g., are objectively more eye pleasing and
> (even if it needs a whole infrastructure to have it working) way faster
> to render.
>
> So, what I would like to point out and ask the mailing list for opinions
> is: which are the _real_ strength points we have "against" Mapnik? What
> we can do to "advertise" Osmarender better and what can we do to expose
> cool opportunities with it?


The main benefits for osmarender I'd say are that there's a pretty low cost
of entry to getting a chunk of data rendered...

The main benefits in the past for T at H as far as I'm aware was...
a) Freshness - if you made changes on a Thursday, you could get to see the
changes rendered up same day... Mapnik at the time only got updated once
each week...
b) See it all low zoom style - low zoom shows all features which makes for
an interesting view... some people like it, some don't... But, it is
interesting when looking to see what level of coverage exists for different
parts of the world...
c) maplint - an overlay layer showing problems with the map data
d) it's the main platform using osmarender which promotes further osmarender
development

Things have changed though... a) is actually a potential negative point now
that mapnik updates are much more regular, the turnaround in t at h in most
cases is now probably longer than for mapnik... b) is still valid, as long
as the low zoom update process hasn't been killed off... c) as maplint has
been enhanced to spot more problems it's value to me has faded away... now
the entire area I look at it filled with errors or warnings, that aren't
actually errors making it difficult to see if there are any real errors
there and at the same time a number of other quality checking tools have
come into being with most offering the option of only viewing certain types
of issue... d) is still valid, choice is good...

I wonder what T at H could do to give more value, what other cool things could
it do... to be honest I'm not sure... Regarding osmarender though, it seems
that your work has the potential to make osmarender more heavily used
outside of T at H which would seem to be a good thing :)

d
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