Saturday, 27 November 2010

Townguide - where next?

My townguide map rendering application is about a year old now, but hasn't changed much since last winter.
Waldemar did a lot of work on it for his Google Summer of Code project where he re-hashed the townguide renderer code to make it more modular and produced a django based web front end.
I have not done very well getting this working because I do not understand django well enough to sort out a few minor bugs in it.
Instead I have taken his re-hashed renderer code and developed it further to make it even more modular - as well as 'plugins' for different PDF output formats, there are plugins for the base map and for different map overlays (a grid, custom markers, gpx tracks etc.) [well nearly anyway].  It also uses mapnik2 so can now produce nice high resolution output to make it comparable to the much prettier maposmatic output.

I have been reading a book about django for a few days now (Python Web Development with Django by Forcier, Bissex and Chun) and feel that I should be able to understand both Waldemar's code and the maposmatic version, so I will have a go at the web front end now - there seems little point in developing my clanky php version with these two much slicker front ends available.

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