Here’s the video on Vimeo. Trunk commits in orange/red and sandbox commits in blue/green (with apologies to the color blind). Credits to code_swarm for the animations.

• Mike Adair (DM Solutions) and Julien Lacroix (Mapgears) finished Mike’s work on a graticule control, which also brings label positioning and a utility function to format coordinates
• Julien also started looking closer at the Refresh strategy that Kris Geusebroek (Xebia) had originally contributed.
• Robert Coup (Koordinates Ltd.) dug deep into memory leaks and came up with several patches, all of them with memory tests. He is still working on more leak fixes, based on an original patch from Kris.
• Klokan Petr Přidal provided a small but effective patch to support tile grids with truncated tiles at the bottom and right grid edges. This is necessary to support layer types like Zoomify, for which another patch is awaiting review.
• Marc Jansen (Terrestris) started cleaning up the examples: he added more keywords, made improvements to descriptions and made notes about deprecated practices that some of the examples still show.
• Volker Mische (LisaSoft) put some efforts into making it possible to drag OpenLayers maps with the moving mouse cursor leaving the map viewport (like e.g. in Google Maps). There is still some work required, but I will help Volker and this fix should be in trunk soon. On a side note: this issue is very old - ticket #39
• Roald De Wit (LisaSoft) made the pink tiles for unavailable image tiles configurable with CSS.
• Roald and Volker also went to the drawing board with me, and by looking at the slider of the PanZoomBar control we found a way how a new control base class could separate the UI from the map interaction. There was not enough time to do a proof-of-concept implementation, but Roald and Volker are about to do this in a sandbox. Expect more discussion on this on the dev list in the near future.
• Eric Lemoine (CampToCamp) made an older patch that makes the LayerSwitcher configurable with CSS ready for trunk.
• Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) and Eric and reviewed some tickets that were in the pipeline and put the fixes into trunk.

Having developers of several projects sitting in the same room also leads to synergies: Klokan Petr Přidal (known from MapTiler), as he was sitting next to Mike Adair (known from proj4js) coded a quick example of raster reprojection with Canvas and proj4js.
Klokan Petr Přidal showing Mike Adair and Marc Jansen that proj4js can do more than just vector reprojection.

I (Andreas Hocevar, OpenGeo) did my best to support everyone who participated. Apologies if I wasn’t able to help with all issues during the sprint, but I will be available with support and advice for all the good work that was started, so it can be finished successfully.

• More OpenLayers.Console.warn and error calls for better diagnostics in debug mode.
• Clean up examples: more consistent coding style, remove examples of deprecated behavior (or archive them separately), organize examples by category and make them more easily discoverable.
• Finish moving style declarations to CSS (pink tiles first!)
• Work on separating GUI from controls, more event driven design.

We hope that people have a chance to dig into some of this work at Saturday’s code sprint.

Presentations (that mention OpenLayers in the abstract)

• Maptivism: GIS for the People!
• MapTiler: map publishing a la Google Maps
• OCEAN Toolkit: Incorporating Local Knowledge into Marine Spatial Planning
• Comparing apples and oranges: Uncovering the mystery of component selection in WebGIS projects
• SCENZ-Grid, The implementation of a Science Collaboration and Computation Environment
• There is no alternative to OpenLayers…?
• GeoShield: a server side user permissions management to OGC services
• Mapping interviews with open source technologies
• Visualising animal movements in ‘near’ real time
• Building community information systems with Drupal and OpenLayers
• Mobile Mapping for Field Data Collection
• OpenLayers: Vector Mayhem
• Building a SDI massively based on OWS
• ZOO project : an open WPS Platform
• Building a web mapping application with GeoExt
• Maps and BI for large organizations
• OpenGeo: a ‘dot-org’ to build the Open Geospatial Web
• How to create a web 2.0 mapping with MapFish development framework ?
• An hybrid GIS solution to manage the French gas utility network
• GeoPrisma : An Access Controlled Map Generator
• MarineMap: Participatory Marine Protected Area Design Using a Web-Based Open Source Too
• Open Web Processing Services for Improving Accuracy of GPS tracks using Filtering and Map-Matching
• ebRIM interface for GeoNetwork OpenSource

Workshops (mentioning OpenLayers)

• Geospatial BI with FOSS: an introduction to GeoMondrian and Spatialytics
• Introduction to the Open GeoStack: PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, and OpenLayers
• Making Maps Fast - Performance tuning and Tile Caching
• OpenLayers - Your Foundation for Browser Based Mapping
• Practical introduction to MapFish, the web 2.0 mapping application framework

(Update: Workshops list linked to abstracts.  Thanks Shoaib.)

The snapping example demonstrates some of the configuration options of the snapping agent.  This control can be set up to work with any number of target layers.  Modified features in a source layer are snapped to eligible features in target layers based on tolerance settings.  Snapping options for nodes, vertices, and edges can be independently configured.

The split feature example uses the new split control to generate temporary sketches for splitting existing features.  The control can also be configured to listen for edits on an existing layer and split features on any target layer.

The snapping and split controls can be used together to provide an editing environment that maintains some basic topology rules.  Both controls trigger events that let the application designer customize exactly what happens before, during, and after snapping and splitting.  You can find documentation and additional examples for both of the controls in the growing prose documentation.

Thanks to Sweco for supporting this work.  We’re excited to have it in the trunk.

OpenLayers Case Studies: Examples showing the usage of OpenLayers inside of organizations, and how the use of OpenLayers has helped that organization.

Currently, the number of case studies is small, but we’re working on growing these case studies so that for any particular application, there is an example of someone who has used OpenLayers to do something similar.

If you’re interested in sharing a case study with the OpenLayers project, feel free to comment here, or follow up to the mailing list post made on the topic.

Happy Holidays!

OpenLayers was the first mapping framework to make an explicit statement that it was not an application at all, but a toolkit for building mapping applications. This different approach resulted in a somewhat long curve to acceptance. In its infancy, the project was used only by developers: people who had a strong knowledge of what they wanted to do, and needed to have more control over their tools in order to do it. This early audience helped to build a rapid development environment where many of the users of the code were also able to contribute fixes and improvements based on their needs. This developer-friendly environment may be one of the key differences that has allowed OpenLayers development to continue to grow.

More is included in the full article, available as a PDF from the GeoConnexion website.

I have made the workshop documents available - and am looking forward to putting up a couple translations soon (French and Spanish at least).  I’ll be shifting around the structure a bit and making an HTML version (and RST source) available at some point.  If you’re interested in using the material, please do - we’ve put on a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

You can find some instructions on getting set up for the workshop on our workshop wiki.  Note this version requires a local GeoServer running (or a proxy).  I’ll update the material to work with a publicly available GeoServer at some point.

If you make use of the material, or are interested in doing a translation, let me know (me @ opengeo.org).

(Update: Initial HTML version is now up - http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers/intro/doc/en/)

(Update II: Thanks to Yves Jacolin, we’ve now got a French translation of the workshop: http://workshops.opengeo.org/openlayers/intro/doc/fr/)

As of 2.7-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.7 release closes 187 outstanding
tickets, split nearly down the middle between bug fixes and new
features. Although this ticket count is less than previous releases,
the 2.7 release is the first release which has been executed as a
date-based release (instead of feature-based)… which represents a
bit of a departure for the project. Whether or not we will continue to
make releases based on this fixed date style is up in the air, but the
experiment has proved interesting and mostly successful.

The 2.7 release should not present the drastic changes that we’ve seen
in previous releases (like 2.6). Overall, it turns out to be much more
of a bug fix release, although it does include some exciting new
functionality. Highlights include:

* Vector-Behavior: Strategies, Protocols, Filters (though the
completion of this going in at RC2)
* Improved Vector rendering for better performance
* Canvas rendering class
* Z-Ordering and Y-Ordering for Vector layers
* New Basic Measurement Control
* New OpenLayers.Request interface for AJAX
* Smarter Popups

… and tons of other new features and bug fixes that you can see
detailed here: http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Release/2.7/Notes.

For information on possible changes that will need to be made between
this version of OpenLayers and previous versions, please look at the
Release notes.

We invite you to help us test the 2.7 release candidate! To test 2.7
in your applications, include the following tag in your
OpenLayers-powered page:

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/.
Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.7 version and 2.7 RC1
milestone.

There are so many people who have really made this release happen, too
many to name here. OpenLayers is not about the fame, it’s about the
glory. You know who you are. Thank You.

A special thanks, though, goes out to John Frank/Josiah Strandberg at
MetaCarta and Chris Holmes from OpenGeo for putting up the funds and
clearing away the time so that we could have an excellent ‘bunker
week’ out in Cambridge at the end of July. That bunker was a critical
pow-wow for us in terms of getting things under control for the 2.7
release and also in general for project synergy and getting some great
patches in. Thank you!

All forthcoming RC announcements will be sent only to the Developers
list: anyone interested in tracking the progress to a final release
should subscribe to that list.

We look forward to your feedback on this release.

Tim C. and Erik worked together to integrate Tim’s nice y-ordering support for vector features (see the example with background shadows). Andreas continued to make vector rendering and styling improvements with the addition of well-known graphic names and dash style. Chris closed a good number of tickets and made some performance enhancements. Seb and I laid the groundwork for bringing in the new vector layer behavior work (strategies and protocols).

Thanks to Erik for all the organizational work, to MetaCarta for hosting us in their office and providing time for Erik & Chris, and to The Open Planning Project for supporting the rest of us in the sprint.