On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Steve Hill <st...@nexusuk.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010, Brett Henderson wrote: > > The documentation may not be comprehensive and does assume some knowledge >> around how Osmosis pipelines are constructed, but it is accurate and up to >> date to the best of my knowledge. >> > > It does document each specific commandline parameter, but it is rather > lacking in the "how to" sense - i.e. its great if you know exactly what > commandline parameters you need and just need to understand how to use them, > but less great if you're working out how to use Osmosis to download deltas > for the first time. Yep, that's fair enough. There are some generic Osmosis examples here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Osmosis#Example_Usage and here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis/Examples but neither of those cover replication. There's the minutely mapnik page itself: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Minutely_Mapnik The docs could certainly do with better walk throughs. So far I've left the creation of examples to others as they find them focusing on the reference docs myself. As with everything the challenge is finding time to create additional documentation, and more importantly to keep it all up to date. > "Honking great Java application" is a little excessive, we're hardly >> talking >> about installing a JEE server here. Does this refer to the download size, >> the fact that it runs on Java, or that fact that it seems hard to install. >> > > Well, I was having a bad day and was utterly failing to get Osmosis to work > at all so I may have gone off on one here somewhat unnecessarilly... sorry. > :) > > However, my personal opinion of Java is that it is generally a Bad Thing - > it has certain specific uses but is massively overused in inappropriate > situations. That probably coloured my judgement somewhat. Also fair enough. If there was a simple alternative I'd do it. But there's a few things that make Java the right approach for Osmosis: 1. It's already written in Java ;-) 2. It's a language I'm very comfortable in. 3. It has very good performance for a non-native language which is important due to the large data sets involved. 4. It is robust and so far the only bugs I've found in the Java runtime are limitations on gzipped file sizes (fixed in modern JVMs), and problems with some multi-byte UTF-8 sequences (fixed by using Xerces XML libs). I've often thought about re-writing it in C++, but the reality is that I'll never do it and reaching feature parity would be a huge amount of work for limited gains. Brett
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