On 05/08/2016 07:56, Abhishek Gupta wrote:
1. First of all, is OOP being used in the project? Can I have support
the project in a way it improves my OOP skills?
Yes, lots of the software are OSM is OO based (and so is pretty much
everywhere else in the world today - after all, even OO COBOL is a thing
http://www.objs.com/x3h7/oocobol.htm )
If yes,
2. What are the easiest ways to start contributing? (this is the first
time I am trying to contribute toward a open source project)
The main page of the OSM wiki
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
has a section on "how to develop and use the platform"
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop . There are lots of links there.
PS :-
I am third year computer science undergraduate. I have done courses in
Database Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Data Structure and
Algorithms. Will I be requiring background in anything else to get
started?
A couple of other thoughts...
There's a mailing list for "development" stuff over at
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev . I'd also mention IRC -
see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC - there's a global #osm
channel on OFTC and also a #osm-dev for development and day to day
server admin stuff.
The wiki has a "top 10 tasks" list over at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks . That's probably
worth a read.
There's a help site at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ . That covers
more than just development stuff, but you may find answers to questions
there.
There are various test servers, so if you're doing anything with OSM's
main API please don't write test data to the live server. There's a dev
API at http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/ (among others) that you can
use for testing.
Finally, I'd make a couple of organisational comments...
OSM isn't really an "organised" project in that there isn't one big
github repository with everything in it and one main site that everyone
uses. You'll probably struggle to find links between stuff. For
example, I've linked to the main OSM sites above, but JOSM (one of the
main OSM editors, written in Java) has its own site over at
https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ , with its own bug tracker, releases
etc. The software used to convert OSM data for use with Garmin
handhelds is mkgmap, over at http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/ - again, separate
releases, documentation, mailing list etc.
OSM at its heart is just a big pile of XML data maintained by a
community of mappers. It's not really a "computer science" project in
that sense (though of course lots of software is used by OSM and by
OSM's users). Because there are so many contributors, data consumers
need to constantly think about how to deal with keys and values that
they might not expect, though
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements (and linked pages) should
describe the XML structure OK.
Best Regards (and good luck),
Andy
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