Jeroens blog

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Today I reached 20k emails in my Yahoo! Inbox. The first email dates from Sunday, May 16, 2004 1:31:40 AM, and the 20000th arrived at Sunday, August 16, 2009 6:14:41 PM.

Yesterday evening, I released the 0.3 versions of both Maps and Semantic Maps. The documentation has been given a big overhaul, and now contains up to date info about the latest release in a more easy to comprehend format.

This are my blog posts about the changes in this new version:

• Structural changes for Maps and SM 0.3
• New features in Maps and SM 0.3
• Final changes for Maps and SM 0.3

A list of all changes can be found on the version history pages of Maps and Semantic Maps.

This is the last version I’m creating as part of my Google Summer of Code project, since it ends next Monday. It’s great that so much work has been done, and the extension turned out so well. But at the same time I’m a little sad GSoC is about to end. I had a wonderful time writing Maps and Semantic Maps, and learned a lot of new things, including how open source organizations work, some application architectures and of-course some PHP things I didn’t know yet. Anyway, I’m planning to apply for GSoC 2010 as soon as that’s possible, although I’m not sure for what project and which open source organization.

I’m planning to still get some work done for 0.4, which has currently only custom layer functionality for OpenLayers scheduled. This is a very important to-do though, since it’s in high demand.

Maps and Semantic Maps are almost ready for release now, with all but some small issues resolved. As a follow up to my 2 previous posts about both the structural changes and new feature in maps, this one will address the things changed or added since then.

Configurable map controls

Controls on both Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps map can now be configured by the user with the controls parameter. Yahoo! Maps maps already have this option for a limited set of controls since version 0.2, but the amount of available controls has now been expanded to what the Yahoo! Maps API offers. For Google Maps the change is significantly larger, since a lot of new controls can now be added. These included an overview map, a scale line, a drop down menu for map types, an automated reverse geocoding location determiner and more. All new types and their names will be added to the documentation after the release of 0.3.

Separate meta data for each point

I already described this new feature in one of my previous posts. It has now been completed, and has been extended with an icon parameter, which can be used to display a custom marker. The custom marker functionality is now also available in Semantic Maps, and is meant to be used in Semantic Compound queries, to for example display hamburgers as icons for shops of type ‘fastfood’, and t-shirts for shops of type ‘clothing’.

User friendly error reporting

Until now, no thought was given to what happened when the user provided an address that could not be geocoded. This actually pretty serious shortcoming has now been fixed. When an user provides one address, and it can’t be geocoded, an error message explaining that it couldn’t be geocoded is displayed instead of a map. The same thing will happen when the user provides multiple addresses that can’t be geocoded. When only a few of multiple addresses can’t be geocoded, the map will be displayed with the available coordinates, together with an error message saying some of the results could not be displayed and a list of these addresses. Similarly, for Semantic Maps, when a query returns no results, nothing will be displayed, instead of an empty map.

New OpenLayers layers

A whole list of OpenLayers base layers have been added. These include the satellite, street and hybrid views for Yahoo! Maps and Bing Maps, but also finally the OpenStreetMap layers. The problems I had with the different map projections between OSM and the other services has finally been resolved.

Yay – I just got my new business cards! I now have 500 cards with these front and back sides:

I ordered these cards via flyer.eu, where I had to enter some personal information like name, address and company. Assuming the company field was for the company you worked for, rather then the one you own, I entered Google. Wrong assumption! My receipt now states the order is for Google, located at my home address – LOL.

Like promised in my previous post about Maps and Semantic Maps 0.3, I’ll give you an overview of the most important new features in this new release.

Multi location parser functions

Two completely new parser functions have been added that allow the displaying of multiple points on a map. To avoid confusion, this is a feature in Maps, and has nothing to do with the semantic coordinate aggregation of Semantic Maps, which obviously already has multi coordinate capabilities. The new parser functions are display_points and display_addresses, acting as multi coordinate variants of display_point and display_address, respectively. This feature adds endless new usage options for Maps, from marking the locations you’ve been on holiday to, to a list of restaurants in a city. It will also be extremely useful to use together with the upcoming custom base layers and overlays feature for OpenLayers. An example of such usage is displaying markers with some pop-up contents on an anatomy chart. Note that a form input will likely be added to Semantic Maps to simplify such a task, by making the need to manually find and enter all coordinates obsolete.

Separate title and label for each point

This feature could actually be viewed as part of the multi location parser functions, but I like to keep them separate. Since 0.2, Maps allows you to optionally display a title and label together with the marker representing the provided coordinates or address. Logically, this should be extended to encompass multiple locations when you can put more then one on a single map. This feature has not been implemented yet, cause of some uncertainty about the correct wiki syntax. The current idea is to use something like #display_points:points=55.7557860, 37.6176330~title~label; 1,1~title; 12,34. Such a syntax’s would not allow any ‘;’ or ‘~’ to be displayed into the pop-up.

Configurable map types

In Maps 0.2, an improvement causing the ‘physical’ map type, for Google Maps, to be displayed in the map type control when this map type was set as default was made. This caused me to wonder why the whole control was not made configurable, so that users could specify the map types they want, and the order in which they want them. This is exactly what I’ve done in Maps 0.3, for both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps. The user can now set the map types present in the map type control with the types parameter. When not set, types will be set to the (new) setting holding the default types for the relevant service. The parameter type does still precisely the same, with the addition that the provided value will be added to types when it’s not present in it yet.

While adding this new feature, I also had a close look at the available map types in the latest (sub)version of the Google Maps v2 API. It turned out to be really easy to add support for moon, Mars and sky maps (all 2D). The underneath screenshot shows a map with all the available map types for Google Maps in Maps 0.3. It also demonstrates the new multi location functionality.

The two interesting parameters in the wiki code that is responsible for this map are:

• addresses=Moscow, Russia; New York; London – This is the replacement of address in display_address.
• types=normal,satellite,hybrid,physical,earth,moon,mars,mars-elevation,mars-infrared,sky – The new types parameter that allows users to choose the available map types.

This change now makes both Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps usage more similar to the one of OpenLayers, with the difference that with OpenLayers, types is called layers, and type is called baselayer (althoguh the baselayer is not activated cause of some problems with it).

More to come

Several more new features will be added, and I still have some refactoring to-do’s on my list to tackle before the 0.3 release. I’ll post about those issues as soon as I have more news about them. The new release is coming closer and closer – I estimate it’ll be there in less then a week

Here you have my latest committed changes for both Maps and Semantic Maps.

While searching for some lame image of a nuclear missile with a Google logo on it (I really needed it since someone had said bing.com was better then Google \gasp!), I came across this fun Google Maps implementation.

Just like version 0.2 of both Maps and Semantic Maps, version 0.3 will feature a variety of large structural changes, aimed at increasing the performance of the extensions, making it possible to add new features, but most of all, make it more modular, to allow people to easily extend them. Here you have a list of the mayor changes that have been completed so far, with some explanation of the advantages they bring.

• Base class that bundles common functionality between MapsBaseMap, SMMapPrinter and SMFormInput, and gets inherited by those classes. This class has been named MapsMapFeature. This is a great step towards the complete centralization of all common code, but sadly enough was not implementable the whole way: MapsMapFeature cannot be inherited by SMMapPrinter, since this class already inherits the SMW QP. Yaron suggested to use a ‘has-a’ implementation, witch means creating an instance of one of the classes you want to inherit as a class field, instead of the ‘is-a’ which is the regular inheritance. Although this is doable in theory, it will bring with it some other problems, so will have to wait till another version.

• Separation between the common and specific parameters, and their default values. Each mapping service now holds an array containing the extra parameters they add (so the allowed ones), and another array containing their default values. Note that both arrays are merged with the common arrays at runtime, and will override similarity named items. This allows to change the default value of a common property, or change the aliases.

• Yes, indeed, that’s right, aliases! Property names now have aliases. This means you can add several alternative ways to name the same parameter, for instance, you can make so that ‘auto zoom’ and ‘auto-zoom’ will do excellently the same as the main parameter ‘autozoom’. This is particularly handy for parameters such as ‘centre’ (British spelling) and ‘center’ (American spelling).

• Hook like system for mapping services. This is without a doubt the most important change since 0.1. All hard-coded references to mapping services in the core code have been removed. A service is now added by one multi dimensional array in Maps.php (note that this can also be done in the initialization file of another extension!), which holds the name of the parser functions class and it’s location, the aliases for the service name (feature added in 0.2), and their allowed specific parameters and their aliases. This architecture will allow other people to create their own mapping extension using the Maps (and Semantic Maps) ‘API’, which enables them to focus on the mapping service specific code rather then extension related code, or common mapping code. There are numerous more advantages, like the fact that their ‘extension’ will follow some general norms, which will make it easier for uses to use (and install!) and for developers to work on, and the fact that their code will also benefit from improvements made to the core code of Maps and Semantic Maps. Once 0.3 is release, I’m going to create a new section in both the Maps and Semantic Maps documentation, which will hold a list of why people should consider choosing that approach, as opposed to creating their own little mapping extension, a list of the advantages, and documentation on how to effectively do it.

The above improvements have been made in Maps, but still have to be implemented in Semantic Maps, which is now on the top of my to-do list. I’m also busy with the adding of new functionality, and got some great results so far, but I’ll post about those when more of the work for 0.3 is done.

I’ve been using windows 7 for 3 days now (on my primary machine), and these are my impressions:

The good:

• It’s eating less resources then Vista – although I can’t imagine you didn’t already know that.
• It looks and feels like Vista, but is just smoother to work with. A lot of attention has been paid to usability, so a lot of the small pains of Vista are gone (the list is really huge). This is probably the biggest reason to switch from Vista, and when still using it XP.
• The new task-bar design feels a little awkward at first, but works really logical, so you’re off with it in an instant.
• No lame sidebar to remove every time you install the OS.
• I didn’t have to install any driver or have problems with internet connection, which I did sometimes with Vista or XP.
• It’s compatible with Vista – all my apps still run on it. This is cause at it’s core Win 7 is really similar to Vista.

The bad:

• Quick-launch is disabled by default. Most people probably won’t miss it, since you can pin items in the task-bar. When you are used to having 12 or 14 items in your quick-launch, which is quite doable in Vista if you have a double height task-bar, you’ll be pretty annoyed though. Luckily, you can enable quick launch, but still it’s not as good as the Vista version. Only one line of quick-launch items is displayed on a task-bar with default height, and only one is added when you double the height. This is really lame, since doubling the height of the task-bar isn’t logical, since it’s already almost as heigh as the double Vista one, and isn’t needed, unless you regularly have a few dozen apps open in your task-bar. What makes it even lamer is that the task bar could display 2 lines of quick-launch items, but simply doesn’t. So apparently I’ll have to be satisfied with only 6 (directly click-able) items in my quick-launch.
• The snap-window feature, or whatever it’s called, that enables you to maximize a window by dragging it to the top of your screen, or putting it half screen by dragging it to one of the edges is nice, but sadly you can’t do this on an edge that has another monitor area next to it.
• Still no way to minimize/maximize (win key + d) all windows on one monitor.

I’m going to wait a little with installing it on my other machines. It’s very likely to make both my Win XP and Vista disks obsolete though. No reason to install Vista any more, and same for XP, which I only used cause Vista used up to much resources. I hope most people will upgrade from XP to Win 7, cause that OS is really getting old, and no matter what most people say – Vista is better, assuming your machine is powerful enough.

Zend Studio 7.0 is the next generation of our professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity by enabling you to develop and maintain code faster, solve application problems quickly and improve team collaboration. – zend.com

I just noticed, the new Zend Studio, 7.0, has been released 2 days ago! This is great new for me, since ZS is my primary IDE for PHP development. This release uses the latest Eclipse Platform (Galileo), offers better SVN integration and supports PHP 5.3, as well as a whole variety of other awesome features.

I’ve been trying to get the hang of how SVN works, and to be able to commit to the repository on mediawiki.org for a few weeks now, and finally succeeded – YAY!

The tools I’m now using are the PuTTY applications (this nice U3 app package), TortoiseSVN and Zend Studio. Subversion allows you to do a whole variety of nice things, and I probably won’t be able to grasp how I could ever have worked without it a few months from now.

I had a lot of problems with getting all settings right, mainly cause of some tutorials that just omitted some important step, or where unclear about some stuff. Since I had never worked with SVN, PuTTY or YotroiseSVN before, I did not notice that. This tutorial helped me out though.