With more manpower and additional resources we've managed to finish refactoring the initial mockup client code to use the ender javascript “package manager” and decided to go with qwery, bean, bonzo, underscore, backbone, handlebars and domready instead of a fully bloated js framework like jquery or extjs.
For comparison, just jquery without any other needed jquery plugin weighs 32kb after minifying and compression. Our ender package comes down to 28kb including everything else we seem to need. Maps often seem to be perceived as “annoying” by users if the map responsiveness is less than optimal, so we should always keep in mind to make this as lean and lightweight as possible and use other trickery to “emulate” a fluid experience.
Additionally ruebezahl dedicated some of his available storage and computing resources for the cause and now we already have the first public tileserver and the first version of a couchdb based overlay-server running. Great stuff :)
The git repos are up and running, more information on the pad for now: