i was wondering what Open Street Map tile server to use for a WordPress plugin i am currently working on. I know there is some latency sometimes on the default one and there are some legal stuff that comes to it too. Does anyone have experience on this and could share knowledge? Thanks
The "default" tiles operated by the OSMF are not for heavy use. These servers only have limited capacity and run on donated resources. Using them in a popular WordPress plugin will get you banned very soon. See the tile usage policy for more details.
Alternatives:
Paid-for tile servers
Your own tile server
Related
Didn't find a similar question here on SO. There's an old, closed question (2011) on WordPress SE, where page.ly (not free, premium service, hundreds of dollars a month) and WPEngine (also not free, plans start from $25/mo) are mentioned. Any other, free alternatives?
I use Google Cloud to host WordPress, and their Always Free Tier Compute Engine Instance is enough for a small personal site.
It is a little bit more complicated to setup than WPEngine, but the easiest way to host WordPress on Google Cloud is to use a prebuilt image from the Google Cloud Marketplace. I use images created by Bitnami, such as this one: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/bitnami-launchpad/wordpress
On the Configuration page, you will need to adjust the machine size to be "Micro" and make sure the Region is one of the regions mentioned on the Free Tier page.
The estimated cost will say something like $5.13, but if you have everything configured in a way that matches up with the Compute Engine section of the Free Tier page, it will show up on your bill at $0. Of course there are other things Google Cloud may charge you for, such as if you go over the 1GB data transfer limit, but even so your hosting could be pretty inexpensive if your site is not too busy.
We are planning to develop a new application that should offer:
Android-capable
Turn by turn with voice navigation
Offline maps (and perhaps routing?)
Satellite maps
Truck issues
As fas as I can see, all of the requirements (but the offline routing) is included in different Here Maps developer plans. Nevertheless, I still have some questions:
On their web (https://developer.here.com/plans/api/consumer-mapping), there are two main divisions (API plan and Mobile SDS plans). Which one is better for me and what is the difference?. I mean, it seems clear that I should go for the mobile plans, but not sure if this will be limiting my development in the future.
There appear no pricing options for the Mobile SDKs. We are planning to make the app available to our customers on a free basis and they will be charged for enhanced services. But seeing that API plans are based on a volume basis... how does the mobile plans work? (does it have any cost depending on the number of transactions too?).
Finally, customized POI are the main advantage of our app and is closed to other users (will no be made publicly available). Does the Here api include the option to add our POIs coming from another (ous) database on the fly?.
Thanks in advance,
Jose.
Turn by turn guidance will be only available via the (Premium) MobileSDK. Via REST APIs you can get routing, but not TbT voice guidance. Also Offline is only avaiulable via the Premium MobileSDK. Beside this, the native MobileSDK offers native vectorbased map rendering, when you use the REST APIs you would need to use the raster tiles. So in a nutshell: if you target Mobiles, you should definitely go with the MobileSDK. If you need any feature that's only available via web APIs (platform extensions, isoline routing, and some more), you can still combine these web APIs with the MobileSDK.
Pricing depends on your usecases, so you should discuss your usecase with HERe Sales: https://developer.here.com/contact-us?interest=mobile-sdk#contact-sales
Customized POIs is quite general, but of course you can load datasets from your servers and show them as POIs on the map, but you could also use the Platform Extension CLE, that also allows you to search within your dataset and is seamless integrated in the MobileSDK already.
I'm developing a web based application where I need to overlay some color layers over each country or city . I know that I can use Google maps but the problem I have is that the server where we're deploying the app doesn't have access to the internet .
so I need a map component like Google maps which I can use it offline , can any one suggest any component that I can use ?
You might check out openstreetmap. There you could download the planet.xml file for the whole world or specific files only for the regions you want to serve. Good material can be found also here: www.geofabrik.de
Then you will have to set up your own tileserver, which will crunch png-tiles for the xml-files provided and store all png-maps on your local harddrive.
The tileserver will probably have some web-api also. So your tileserver may run on localhost:8080 or another port, and your website runs maybe on apache on port 80.
Then you would use some web-framework to access your own tileserver. This framework would be
probably http://openlayers.org/ which can also draw shapes onto maps.
As a tileserver-location, you would add the address to your local installed tileserver. Openlayers will then receive the crunched tiles and do some stuff with it.
So, you have to at least once get some information from the internet (planet.xml) and crunch your data. But be aware that this crunching might take a long time depending on how many countries you want to serve and also these png-files will take a lot of space.
Check out openstreetmap.org how to do all this, including some numbers.
Maybe it is even possible just to download the crunched tiles from openstreetmap and put them in a specific order and fire up a tileserver pointing to these tiles. This would probably much easier.
You cannot download the Google-Maps tiles and serve them in your own tile-server, since there is a license restriction on them.
Greetings,
Jan
You're going to find that difficult because the map data alone could take up several hundred megabytes of space to store. The OS provides offline mapping within the UK which they provide free but it is limited and you'll have to manually integrate it into your site.
Having a web-based application that can't access the internet seems a bit daft to me, surely there's a way around that?
we are currently developing a website which will heavily involve connections to several social networks. I name a few (facebook, youtube, flickr, google contacts, windows live contacts, twitter,...)
i know (from collegues) that a library exists for php. called openInviter (http://openinviter.com)
though this site has to be in asp.net and probably with the CMS Umbraco (http://www.umbraco.org)
Instead of targetting each site trough its own (or custom community build) library we were wondering if anyone knows a similar library that target all or many social networks at once. Greatly simplifying the work and complexity of the project.
Depending on what you're looking at doing with the Social Networks, you might want to check out YQL - Yahoo! Query Language - this allows you to work with one API to access a whole host of supported and custom APIs, which might well simplify things for you.
Have you seen RPXNow? There is a .NET library available.
The application is planned to be built using ASP.NET, .NET Remoting & MS SQL Server.
High availability is required at presentation layer, application layer and database.
Does IIS 7.0 provide any advantages over IIS 6.0 in regard to the High availability aspect?
Among the many aspects you want to consider, make sure that you have numbers.
By numbers, I mean how many request per second do you want to deliver? How many users per day are you planning? Are they all going to come in 1 hour or through out the day? Are they simply buying stuff on a e-Commerce website or is it a social network website with lots of pictures and videos?
All those questions matters in how you will architecture your website. If you go with a simple e-Commerce website that should not crash, make sure to have 2 servers with load balancing with some health monitoring on the IIS process. For the database, 1 machine will do the trick especially if you have some RAID hard drives.
However, if you go toward a social network site... things get freaky fast. If users upload pictures, you will need lots of space and much more if they upload videos. You might want to use Cloud Service to host those pictures without too much fees. For videos, you might want to use embeded link like Youtube or Google video.
As for IIS 7.0 versus IIS 6.0, I don't think there will be any significant changes. Both are really reliable.
Take a look at the High Scalability Blog
Make sure your design scales in a horizontal manner.
That is, have your system hiding behind a load balance layer with the servers that are actually providing the service behind the load balance layer.
When you need to increase capacity, you build a new server or servers and plug it in alongside the existing servers. Then you configure the load balance layer to also consider the new server(s) when passing out the work.