Thanks for some really helpful and interesting responses. (Thanks especially to Tom C for a very valuable perspective.)
-- API The API has come up a lot. I've said before and will happily restate now that I think it would be great to get Potlatch talking Rails on the serverside, rather than the SQL at present. It wouldn't affect the Potlatch user experience (which is my primary concern), but would mean more peace-of-mind for Tom H, Steve et al; its benefits could be open to other editors; and it'd remove a major stumbling block when talking about Potlatch, which would be helpful. I don't have any emotional attachment to the code there at the moment - it's simply like that because it was actually developed before OSM moved to Rails (the pre-Rails API was a lot less sophisticated than the current one and really couldn't do what Potlatch needed), and rewriting it in Rails is something I'm not really qualified to do safely without breaking lots of stuff. One can always learn, and given unlimited time I'd like to; but sadly I don't currently have the time to learn AS3, _and_ Rails, _and_ respond to people's requests for Potlatch... oh, and do the day job! So given that the serverside code works, albeit inelegantly, learning to rewrite it hasn't been my priority. I'm very happy, of course, to spend as much time as necessary talking others through how it currently works should they be kind enough to take on the task of rewriting it - I've already documented a bunch of it for Steve. I'm pretty sure that'd be more efficient than me blundering in and writing some very bad Rails code. There are really only two provisos to this and neither's a big one, I think. I do feel fairly strongly that Potlatch, as currently written, and the API should continue to talk AMF to each other rather than XML; it keeps the code compact and fast, especially given that AS1 doesn't have great XML handling. But that's just a transport format, really, just 50 or so lines of (pretty reliable and fast) code. The other one is that it would be good if the getway call, in particular, could exist in _both_ SQL and Rails forms in the code, with a switch called RICHARD_NOT_HIT_BY_BUS_YET to determine which one is called. Up until the time of the bus incident we could use the (very, very simple, read-only) single SQL call because it's between two and four times faster, and this is the one call that does have a significant performance impact on Potlatch. After I'm run over, you could switch to Rails, which means a performance hit but may be considered more maintainable. Please don't treat this as an invitation to drive a bus at me. Pretty much everything I'd want to say on this has already been expressed by TomH: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/025886.html http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2008-May/025889.html -- Frederik's uniqueness point Really can't argue with that. Going back to the Java applet days I did actually want both it and Potlatch to be available at the same time (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/ Talk:Java_Applet_Development); unfortunately this never happened. But as long as the choice is presented through a friendly UI and doesn't confuse novices, it's a good principle. On the openness (or otherwise) of Potlatch, Frederik, I think I mentioned to you in the internationalisation discussion that I'm planning to build a preset tagging system that will let people contribute their own plug-in tagging panels. Otherwise Potlatch's only impact on mapping practices has probably been to hasten the demise of segments which I suspect you agreed with! -- AS1 / AS3 Dave - I think your definition of donkey balls might be different to mine. ;) Or rather, when you've been sucking horse balls for several years then donkey balls don't seem very different. Er, I should probably rephrase that. To me (coming from a Perl script kiddie background, rather than Proper Programming In Java) AS1 is the nice approachable stuff while AS3 is scary with lots of stuff you have to write that doesn't actually do anything. I'm not holding that up as a truth, I don't doubt that AS3's objectively the better language by current norms: it's just that it's an utterly new way of doing things for me, and I can't immediately see the payback for me in spending a long while learning it, then rewriting all 7,000 lines of code. AS3 doesn't yet _do_ much that AS1 doesn't: some clever typography stuff (not needed for Potlatch), faster (but Potlatch's UI is plenty fast, it's the server responses that slow the UI), and better XML handling (but as written Potlatch doesn't need that). And it doesn't make me more marketable as a programmer because I'm not a professional programmer. Now this is my problem, of course, not something anyone else needs to worry about. But it's the thing that I'm still most unsure how to answer. I'm a bit more sure than the other day, though, so thanks, all, for that. :) (Incidentally, I'm talking to Steve, I didn't think there was much point in doing a point-by-point slanging match on the list.) cheers Richard _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
