Jeroens blog

While working on Maps and Semantic Maps, I needed to refactor some class names, and tried to use the refactor tool of Zend Studio, the PHP IDE of my choice. The only thing that happened was an error popping up though. After some searching on the web and posting that problem on multiple help forum’s, someone suggested that I should install the latest version of Zend. At that moment I was using Zend Studio version 6.0. After looking at the wiki page about Zend Studio, I decided to download the latest release, 6.1.2, and installed it. I then replaced my old ZS with it, and switched to my GSoC workspace. This went really smooth, I didn’t encounter a single error, and apparently fixed the refactoring problem. Now I also have a bunch of new features available to me that came with this new version. Zend studio 7 is in the making, presumably based on the new Eclipse 3.5, and will undoubtedly contain a whole variety of new features to speed up the development process. One more tool to wait for…

I know, It’s out for just over 2 weeks now, but I just noticed.

On June 30th, the PHP development team announced the release of PHP 5.3.0, which features some truly epic new functionality.

It haz namezpacez!!!1!!!!!!1!11!!! Wooot! The namespaces are formed a little weird for someone who’s used to .Net and Java, since a backslash ‘\’ is used instead of a dot ‘.’ as separator, and namespaces are only indicated by an opening keyword, not by a container with both start and end like in most other languages. Another nice thing that was added are lambda functions. I actually didn’t know you could not do this in PHP, but now you can, one more sign that PHP is making progress. Hopefully PHP 6 will finally be as nice as languages like Java, and shred the reputation of being a crap language.

I can’t wait for starting to develop with this new version, but will have to wait some more till it’s a little more wildly distributed.

Now that the initial part of my project is almost over, I realized I’m still not really integrated into the MW community IMHO. If there where tools available for mentors and students to easily contact each other, it would be so much more easy to share idea’s with each other and coordinate efforts to solve problems. Sadly, this is not the case. Therefore I decided to send all mentors (and Brion) an email (which I got from Yaron) proposing to create some sort of WM GSoC group. This group would need to provide easy accessible contact info of all the WM GSoC participants and also offer some form of group discussion ability (at such moments I so wish Google Wave was already publicly available). It would have the following benefits:

• Allow everyone to share idea’s. Better to have input from multiple people then only one.
• Multiple people who can help you out. If your mentor is off-line, or isn’t sure about something, you can always ask someone else.
• Students that remain active in the community after GSoC, and the mentors, can coordinate the GSoC effort for WM next year. This would include letting people in the WM community know about GSoC and find potential mentors. Search potential students and  help inform the ones the apply about where to find docs and other relevant stuff.
• It would simply (IMHO) be more fun, and therefore increase the chance the students remain active in the community.

I’m now waiting for the feedback, and hoping something awsome will come from this

Today and yesterday I made some great progress on the Open Layers facet of Maps and Semantic Maps.

I largely completed the query printer for the openlayer result format, and the pop-up balloons for the markers are finally working. The OL QP was the last big part of the work for the first lease of both Maps and SM. Some issues remaining though, which I’ll try to tackle tomorrow: the pop-up balloons should show the properties of the pages they represent, OL maps created by the OL QP don’t auto zoom and centre yet, Yahoo! Maps popups have some gfx error and some OL code needs to be refactord to solve an issue with default layers and their dependencies.

Map code: {{#ask:[[Category:Locations]]|?Has coordinates|format=openlayer|width=610|height=500|layers=google-hybrid,osm,nasa,yahoo}}

Note that I’ve uploaded my latest code to my on-line dev wiki, so you can now see the result working

After viewing a video about large scale open source projects and their infrastructure (FOSDEM), and another one about The Myth of the Genius Programmer (GoogleDevelopers), I decided that I should increase the visibility of my project code as soon as possible. I’ve uploaded an archive of my code to my server, and will put it on the MW dev list first thing tomorrow.

During the last few days, I worked on getting Open Layers to work in Maps.

Map wiki code:

{{#display_address:
service=openlayers
|address=Moscow, Russia
|width=610
|Height=500
|layers=google,yahoo,openlayers,bing, nasa}}

As you can clearly see from both the screenshot and the wiki code, the big difference with the other mapping services is that Open Layers supports multiple base layers from different data sources. It also supports multiple overlays, but I’ve decided to keep things relatively simple for the moment, and stick with one auto generated marker layer. Later on custom layer definitions in the wiki itself might be added, depending on the demand.

Another difference, although not visible here, is the controls parameter. Open Layers provides have a whole variety of controls (you can even create custom ones) that you can place onto one map. An example of adding controls with this parameter: controls=layerswitcher,mouseposition,panzoombar,scaleline,navigation. Like with the layers parameter, each value should be separated with a comma. Note that the controls example contains the current default controls (which will be added when no controls parameter is specified in the wiki code), and therefore can be added to the wiki code of the above map without affecting the output.

To retain consistency with the other mapping services, the control parameter form Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps has also been changed into controls. For Yahoo! Maps this actually makes more sense then the old approach, since you can add both zoom and pan controls individually or together.

I’m now working on the popup baloons for the markers, which is apparently not so straight forward to do with Open Layers, and is testing my JavaScript knowledge. It’s possible I’ll also change the layers parameter, since it currently does only allow hard coded layers in the Maps extension itself to be displayed.

How to have GOOGLE lol ingame, for dummies:

While working on some issues in Maps for my GSoC project, I got the latest technews mail of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). This mail contained an headline about Quantum Key Distribution which catched my attention. After reading that mayor scientific effort is on the way to implement this security paradigm, I got really interested in how it actually works, and went to have a look at the wiki article about Quantum Cryptography.

I can really recommend this article to everyone who is interested in cryptography. It contains a basic explanation of the involved principles, and a detailed, but step by step, explanation of the actual encryption, and how the security is guaranteed. I won’t be implementing this alongside the block ciphers and public key cryptography in my converter any time soon though

I am currently busy with the last big chunk of work for the first release of Maps and Semantic Maps, which is Open Layers integration. I’ll post about this as soon as I got more concrete results.

The integration of Open Layers is proving, as expected, to be more challenging then with the other mapping services. On the other hand, the ‘infrastructure’ of the extensions themselves are completely ready to handle it, and I’ve now got a really good idea of how the mapping stuff works, so this should not take up to much time. I’m hoping to get all the Open Layers work, both semantic and non-semantic, done in 2 weeks, so I can release a first version of both extensions.

So what will be in the extensions for the first release? I’ll complete the wiki documentation articles that will answer this question before the first release, but here you already have a small list:

• Mapping services: Google Maps (+ Google Earth), Yahoo! Maps, Open Layers (only 1 marker layer per map)
• Parser functions: display_point, display_address, geocode, geocodelat, geocodelon (these functions will work for every mapping service)
• Semantic aggregation of coordinates for each mapping service
• Semantic Forms input with Google Maps

After discussing with Yaron, we came up with a few things that could be added after the initial release. We are hoping to get some feedback about wanted functionality so we can prioritize the work.

• KML support for Google Earth and Open Layers
• Multiple custom (wiki defined) Overlays for Open Layers
• Display_route parser function, which will accept 2 points/locations and auto generate a route
• Add Bing Maps (formerly Virtual Earth) as a mapping service
• Add tag syntaxis for Open Layers, to simplify the structure of the parameters in wiki code

Both list only contain the mayor features, and therefore are not complete.

Now it’s back to work for me

The basic Google Earth integration for Google Maps in Maps and Semantic Maps is finished!

This is really cool, and was ridiculously easy to do. The output increased  just one tiny line of JavaScript (Way to go Google Maps/Earth API!). The changes to the extensions themselves where also relatively small, although I did have to refactor some tasks from the main parser function in Maps to the service specific functions (snif). This change allows more diversity in the parameters for each service, and would probably have been required for the Open Layers integration anyway.

I hope everyone can grasp the enormous complexity of the code required to add the Google Earth map type to a Google Map. You have to add this parameter to your wiki code: earth=on. Suggestions to simplify this monster down are welcome of course

A thing to remember when enabling the Google Earth map type is that the default map type will be ‘earth’, and not ‘normal’. So when you want a normal map to be displayed when the page loads, be sure to add type=normal. I’ll add a more thorough explanation of this to the extension page of Maps later on.

Now, time for some nice screenshots – admitted, they are no way near as cool as the real maps.

I’m considering to make a nice vid tutorial about Maps and Semantic Maps if they are finished enough before my deadline, to both promote the extensions and show off how epic they are

I’ve found the bug, causing the Yahoo! Maps generated by the Semantic Maps Yahoo QP not to correctly zoom and centre themselves, I mentioned in my previous post. It was caused by some debug line I forgot to remove in my PHP code. This resulted into a JS command messing up the correct settings, which had totally escaped my and some other people’s attention somehow. I had posted my problem with the complete JS output onto a few programming help forums, and got a reply remarking the incorrect line at helpmij.nl, a Ducth support forums, by ErikBooy007.

After solving this issue, I added some more documentation and exampled to the Maps extension page, which is still far from finished, on mediawiki.org. I also started working on the Google Earth integration (which is working epic nice), a subject I’ll explain more detailed in my next post about Semantic Maps.