On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:33 AM, Jeffrey Warren <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm adding GeoJSON and also structured OSM JSON output formats to a rails > port 0.6 API I'm running; are these changes I could potentially commit, so > such formats could be offered by OSM proper, or are they too specific a > need? I'll be posting the changes online regardless.
The question you should ask yourself is are these formats to enable editing of the database? If not, i.e. if you have read-only applications in mind, then I would say it's more appropriate to add them to a data-distribution server (c.f. trapi, xapi et al). Ideally the load on the main API should be for editing-related purposes only. If it is indeed for editing, then this could open a cavalcade of similar requests for other languages/formats. Most importantly, every single one of them will need to have full test suite coverage (OK, the existing stuff doesn't yet, but there's no need to make a bad situation worse) and adds to the complexity of the code, future reorganisation cost etc. So we need to be cautious when weighing up cost/benefits. If it's just a translation from one format to another then maybe implementation as an abstraction layer that's independent of the main code? Might lead to divergence, I guess. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
