A short wrap up as this is my first diary entry: I’ve learned about OSM through a job at university where we started to develop a vector-tile service and an android map-viewer about two years ago[1]. Since then I’ve worked on the OpenGL map renderer (based on mapsforge), a vector tile format for efficient rendering (implemented as TileStache provider) and simplification of OSM data for lower zoom-levels, besides other things. Probably the biggest struggle was trying to make sense of the OSM tags and define rules how to render them properly :)

In my spare time I started abstracting the android specific code from VectorTileMap library through interfaces and use libgdx as a backend. Libgdx is a multi-platform game library which itself provides different backends. Its html-backend uses GWT to compile java code to javascript which turned out to work pretty nicely.

Ok, without further ado, this was all way too technical I guess, enjoy the demo :)

World | [Bremen] (http://city.informatik.uni-bremen.de/map/#scale=17,rot=266,tilt=41,lat=53.074,lon=8.806)

Code is on Github. Note: tiles below zoom 12 are currently reworked.

[1] http://www.opensciencemap.org/