20 years of openstreetmap-website

General talk
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openstreetmap-website, the codebase that powers our website and API, turns 20 years old today.

OSM isn’t really the place for nostalgia,[1] but the young ’uns here[2] should know that it used to be very different around here before openstreetmap-website. No changesets to leave nasty comments on. No notes to close without reading. We even tried out showing adverts on the homepage to logged-out users.[3] That’s why we can’t decorate our donation banners with Jimmy Wales’ smile like Wikipedia does.

Screenshot of the OpenStreetMap homepage as of September 1, 2006. The upper-left corner is the project’s original logo and the slogan, The Free Wiki World Map. The tabs along the top say View, Edit, and GPS traces. Below it is a search bar. The slippy map consists of a grid of broken images with the alt text “loading tile…”. At the bottom is the message: We’re trialing adverts to support the project. Login and they go away.
Screenshot of the OpenStreetMap homepage as of September 1, 2006. The upper-left corner is the project’s original logo and the slogan, The Free Wiki World Map. The tabs along the top say View, Edit, and GPS traces. Below it is a search bar. The slippy map consists of a grid of broken images with the alt text “loading tile…”. At the bottom is the message: We’re trialing adverts to support the project. Login and they go away.2048×1536 251 KB

After an initial checkin to Subversion, @Steve hacked away at the “Rails port” for a month, then started a brief discussion on the dev mailing list that turned into a more OSM-proper going-in-circles debate on the dev mailing list. Should we really port the site from Java to Ruby on Rails, or should we focus on standing up a better editor first? With @Richard starting work on a brand-new Flash editor in the browser, skeptics were betting that mappers would prefer to run JOSM inside a Java applet in the browser instead.[4]

The next May, the site migrated to the Rails port and OpenLayers for showing off two – count ’em – two map layers.

Screenshot of the OpenStreetMap homepage as of June 10, 2007. The slippy map shows London in the Mapnik layer with British road colours. The ads are gone.
Screenshot of the OpenStreetMap homepage as of June 10, 2007. The slippy map shows London in the Mapnik layer with British road colours. The ads are gone.2048×1536 899 KB

The slippy map shows the area to the southwest of London in the Osmarender layer.
The slippy map shows the area to the southwest of London in the Osmarender layer.2048×1536 446 KB

Twenty years is a fairly long time as software projects go – especially these days, when you can accidentally churn out a whole codebase by mumbling something in your sleep for the chatbot on your phone to overhear, and then forget all about that weird dream when you wake up in the morning. To this day, the OSM platform continues to evolve alongside the community. Familiar names like @TomH are still around, joined by new faces, too many to list. Let’s have a toast for the project that keeps us going.

(Thanks to eagle-eyed @pablobm for noticing the anniversary the other day.)

  1. That’s the other project. ↩︎

  2. For the purpose of this post, “young ’un” is defined as older than 13 but younger than 20. Or if “BAN POTLATCH” means nothing to you. ↩︎

  3. You’ll have to use your imagination about the ads. They don’t show up in the Wayback Machine. It’s all Google’s fault. ↩︎

  4. Now the “AJAX editor” is the most popular one for editing Java. :indonesia: :id: ↩︎

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Of course it was really the creation of mapnik by @artemp and mod_tile by @Jon_Burgess that allowed us to have a reliable and regularly updated map on the new site.

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and not to forget about Tiles@home

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at least all these older layouts had a link to the wiki in a prominent position, even when the menu was just 3 items.
Now we have all of these:

and no space (I guess?) for a direct link to the wiki, you have to go to help and scroll down to the last item. As if it should be hidden :face_with_peeking_eye:

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At one point in 2006, www.openstreetmap.org redirected to wiki.openstreetmap.org. The main page had some links to the slippy map amid all the other stuff.

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Goodness.

I think the crucial date was 5 May 2007, when we had a hackathon in St Aldate’s Church Hall (the Conference Room) in Oxford. The wiki says I organised it, which I don’t recall, but tbh its memory is probably better than mine.

That was when Steve, Nick and others got the Rails port ready for deployment, and when I spent much of the afternoon staring at the Rails code thinking “how the hell does this work?”. I hadn’t encountered ORMs before, let alone a magick-laden framework like Rails. Eventually I gave up and glued Potlatch into it with raw SQL queries, which is very much not the Rails way, but it worked. (Ironically, 18 years on, Ruby is my favourite language by a long chalk, though I still don’t like Rails.)

The wiki history page records that the Rails port came online that day. Actually it was the next day, but who’s counting.

I walk past that church hall very regularly - my son is a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral and it’s on the walking route from Oxford station to the cathedral. Every time I walk past, I remember spending a day there staring at Ruby code.

But what I don’t recall is which pub we went to afterwards. I have a very vague recollection that it might have been the (long lost) Far From The Madding Crowd but I am again open to correction…

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