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tmcw's Diary

Recent diary entries

iD with modules 🔜

Posted by tmcw on 24 August 2016 in English.

There’s long been a desire & incoming wish for iD to be modular. Modular is a pretty general term, so I’ll narrow it down into three general goals:

  1. Modules as a way of building a system. Using rollup, browserify, etc., in order to structure code and separate internal components in a nice, predictable way.
  2. Modules as a way of letting other systems include yours. Generally, in JavaScript-land, means publishing to npm.
  3. Modules as ways to include new code in your project. This is more in the vein of iD plugins. Supporting plugins would let us support contentious or rare needs without bikeshedding their inclusion to the main project.

With the help of Bryan, Kushan, David, Beau and Martin, we’ve made significant progress toward the first goal and are nearly at the finish line. iD will be switching from a system where we concatenate source files and use GNU make as a build process - to one that uses rollupjs to build a bundle from JavaScript modules. The expected benefits are big, for maintainers:

  • iD no longer relies on the global namespace for dependencies like d3, so there’s less chance for conflict.
  • misnamed requires or invalid requires will be caught early
  • we can use npm modules for our dependencies, rather than keeping them in the project’s source tree
  • we’ll be able to build a faster and more reliable environment for development
  • we’re upgrading d3 to v4, keeping it in line with the changing software world.

This doesn’t immediately win us (2) and (3) but it pulls them closer. Soon, a new editor could reuse iD’s data model, and iD could load new functionality from a plugin.

And there likely won’t be any user-facing change as part of this port. This is the stage where the developers throw tens of hours into the low-level guts so that plugins can be possible and long-term maintenance can be less painful.


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Location: Logan Circle/Shaw, Ward 2, Washington, District of Columbia, United States

COFFEEDEX & the single-tag revolution

Posted by tmcw on 1 December 2014 in English.

COFFEEDEX is a thing I made to track coffee prices worldwide.

Late in the iD Editor sprint, I wrote osm-auth to make the OAuth dance easier for potential future editors, thinking that a lot of common editing tasks would require super-focused UIs. COFFEEDEX is more or less the first attempt at doing that: it edits a single tag on a single type of node, amenity=cafe, and only on local nodes.

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Location: Chester, Morris County, New Jersey, 07930, United States

William & Mary Maps

Posted by tmcw on 23 September 2009 in English.

Thanks to Stu Hamilton and the Center for Geospatial Analysis at The College of William and Mary (my proud alma mater), I've been able to really build out the maps in the Williamsburg area and especially regarding W&M itself. There's still more to come, dependent on transforming some polygon data to lines and making a few more imports.

Location: Walnut Hills, Williamsburg, Virginia, 23185, United States