Technology

Inaugural Ordnance Survey Developer Event

Anthony Marshall
Anthony Marshall
27 Feb 2013
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Last night London played host to the inaugural OS Developer Event and it was great to be there. I always enjoy having the chance to meet with members of the OS development and support teams and would recommend attending to anyone!

During the workshop part of the evening we implemented a geocoder for OpenSpace in mapstraction. Mapstraction is an Open Source common interface for a wide variety of JavaScript map APIs. It’s designed to enable a developer to switch from one maps API to another as smoothly and as quickly as possible. The geocoder uses the OpenSpace Gazetteer for town names and the postcode lookup for postcodes. It is not as fully featured as other mapstraction geocoder implementations, but at least what OpenSpace does support is now available.

OpenSpace is definitely feeling slicker after its v4 release, based on the latest stable OpenLayers (version 2.12) with full mobile multi-touch support. It was also encouraging to be reminded that the OS allow developers access to new versions of the API every 2 weeks during development, so that they can supply feedback.

All in all a great night; I’m looking forward to the next event already!

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