TECHDEBT-Replace poorly maintained OS OpenSpace library with another

[chrisdebian]

Nick has done some brilliant work to get his unmaintained code working https://gitlab.com/nickw1/mapthepaths-android/-/commits/morow-investigation. A couple of things need to be updated, and one of these the OS OpenSpace library.

Can anyone with the appropriate skills, help to integrate a replacement for OS OpenSpace library?

Many thanks,

Chris.

[nickw1]

Again this is something I should be able to help with, time permitting. osmdroid (https://github.com/osmdroid/osmdroid) is likely to be the way to go, and it is a library I have used before.

A bit of background on why I went with the OS OpenSpace SDK originally. I lacked (and still lack, to be honest) the server resources to setup an England and Wales-wide OSM tileserver. However the OS provided raster Open Data tiles which I thought would be a reasonable base tile layer for the map. The map is then overlaid by vector data representing council ROWs and ways from OSM.

osmdroid is a more standard approach, and the Spherical Mercator projection used by osmdroid is of course the standard one for web mapping.

This however leads to the question of what do we use for a tileserver? Is there a tileserver already setup to provide for UK-based OSM projects? Could we use the standard OSM tileserver? (I realise the answer to the latter is generally "no" for high volume projects, but MOROW could be an exception as its aim is to directly improve OpenStreetMap itself by mapping ROWs).

While the app is in development and not released, I think it would be OK to use the OSM tileserver but we'd need to get an official "yes", probably from the DWG, going forward. Might be worth asking on the osm-gb mailing list too.