After setting up the MapQuest Render Stack and poking around in its code I consider using it for the Multilingual Maps project. Unlike Tirex it can run on a cluster of machines for reliability and load distribution. That will be important for a tile server working on “Wikipedia scale”.

Whatever way we’ll develop for rendering the multilingual tiles, we have to get the information about which language(s) the user wants from the user to the tileserver. Web browsers typically support the selection of an ordered list of preferred languages. This list is sent through the Accept-Language header to the web server. We could use this setting to determine the language for the labels. But in some situations people might not know about this setting or can’t change it. Maybe they are sitting in an Internet cafe in a foreign country. In that case it might be easier for them if they can just change the language setting on the web page. This is especially interesting if the web site knows which languages are available and only shows those options. The browser setting doesn’t know anything about actually available languages, it just has one large master list.

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.