Ian McIntosh wrote:
Hi Everyone,
Update time.
First, personal: I am still in South America, but perhaps more settled
now. I would very much like to continue working on Roadster.
Up until this point, Roadster has had only a few people working on it.
If Roadster is going to be a success, it'll take many more people
contributing.
So, this is a call for help! This mailing list has 70+ subscribers now,
and I'm hoping there are some people here who want to get involved.
In addition to bringing more people in, I'd like to reduce the scope of
the project for version 1.0.
Version 1.0 feature proposal
============================
1) move map data loading (and rendering?) functionality to an external
library (libroadster?)
2) external library will use a better (faster/smaller) data format (no
more MySQL GIS) stored in a SQLite database
3) ability to zoom from street level to state/country level *quickly*
(which probably means storing data at several levels-of-detail)
4) a new GUI in a high level language (C#, Ruby, Python?) with only
basic map navigation functionality (mouse drag, edge scroll, zoom
buttons, zoom rect tool, history back/forward buttons)
============================
I see this as a solid base for more advanced functionality, and we cand
decide later where it should be added (in the application, in the
library, or as an application plugin).
At that point, multiple frontends could be developed independently using
native toolkits (GTK+, QT, Cocoa, Win32).
So that's the vision. What do you think??
-Ian
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Ian,
I have been messing off-and-on with databasing the Tiger/Line data in
different ways for almost two years. I like MySQL. I have also tried
Gigabase and sqlite. Gigabase was just too difficult to use and I feel
that it would hinder a projects ability to attract new developers as
opposed to a SQL database that everyone is familiar with. Sqlite has too
few features. Spatial indexing (of some form) is a must-have. Full-text
searching is also really nice to have.
I believe that you could completely seperate the database from the
mapping applications. This would help adoption because many people might
be interested in web-applictions, others might be interested in
hand-held computer software.
I highly recommend anything in Python whenever possible. That is what I
usually work in.
I am willing to help, but my interests, given my limited time that I can
work, would be primarily in supporting applications. For instance, I am
toying with the idea of a python-glade application that allows the user
to download data from yahoo or google local for a limited area and at
the data to the database.
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