The Osmium framework has been around for about a year and a half now and has grown to include a lot of functionality. But there is still much to to. In this blog post, I have collected some of those things. There is no particular order to the following list.

The Unicode character set contains somewhat over one million code points from 0 to hex 10ffff. That wasn’t always so. Unicode started out with only 16 bit characters, or about 65000 code points. At some point it was decided that that wasn’t enough and the version 2.0 released in 1996 switched to the larger character set.

I have wanted to play around with NodeJS for a while. I had some time on the weekend so I implemented a small tileserver for Tirex using NodeJS.

Some month ago I introduced Taginfo and mentioned there in passing that the statistics collection is done based on a C++ framework called Osmium. I promised another post and I am delivering on this promise now. I have been working on Osmium on and off over the last 6 months or so and, while it is far from perfect, I think it could be actually useful for other people now. So lets dive right in. What is Osmium and what is it good for?