On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Brion Vibber<brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
Hello there, long time no see:)
In the last few days I've been working on the project of getting
OpenStreetMap onto Wikimedia as outlined here:
Woohoo!
Anyway, one thing standing between us and world
domination is
rendering those static maps, I'm going to implement this but first I'd
like to get comments on *how* we'd like to do it, so I've written a
plan for doing it:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SlippyMap/Static_map_generation
I added a couple quickie notes on the talk page...
Ah, thanks, to reply to this:
Static maps of arbitrary size presumably have much the
same problem here as the map tile images. How is it handled there?"
The same way I want to do static map generation. Just put an arbitrary
expiry time on it & serve it to the client.
It might be good to use a Google Maps Static-like
model here; the
MediaWiki end can just make itself an <img> and stick all the relevant
info onto the URL, calling out to the static map server.
That's a very good idea, but I'd been assuming that I wouldn't be able
to do that -- that each apache server was supposed to do things like
EasyTimeline generation / image rescaling and likewise static map
generation on its own & write it to the shared image NFS.
But just being able to call out to an existing server makes things a
whole lot easier.
Then we can just run dedicated rendering machines with the apaches
being dumb about all this crazy map stuff.
This also means that we can set up the Wikimedia Deutschland servers
to do tile rendering and then easily test it on a big wiki (like
dewiki) by just enabling the SlippyMap extension which won't do
anything more fancy than point static/tile URLs to the external
service.
So yay!
Either storing it on local disk there or simply
leaving it to be cached by upper-level squids
Throwing it at the squids and making it their problem would be simpler
for *me* at least.