OpenLayers Blog

MapGuide 2.0 was Released on Thursday, with the main feature being:

the integration of Fusion; a flexible, extensible templating system that provides the ability to separate application presentation from its functional components

More information on Fusion is available from DM Solutions. Fusion uses OpenLayers as its mapping layer, and the recent addition of the MapGuide layer to OpenLayers trunk was as a result of the efforts put forth by DM Solutions to help contribute back improvements made to OpenLayers for its use within Fusion.

You can see examples of Fusion in action on the MapGuide Beta site.

Congrats to the MapGuide team on their success in using OpenLayers to build a great looking frontend for MapGuide maps!

Well, this is really about debugging any web app in a browser. Firebug, obviously, is critical to JavaScript development. Having a full featured debugger makes us a bit less embarrassed about using the term development in conjunction with JavaScript. Alas, the world does not run on Firefox.

Firebug Lite is an acceptable cross-browser solution. In OpenLayers, we include a patched version that works a bit better in IE. While nothing like a debugger, Firebug Lite provides simple command-line access outside of Firefox.
My new favorite for work outside of Firefox is Jash. Especially handy is the little bookmarklet (drag to your bookmarks). Open up a page with a map, click your Jash bookmarklet, and start exploring.  This is particularly nice for remote debugging.
>> map [object Object]
>> map.layers.length
3

Start typing map.getZ and hit tab for completion, see

2. getZoom
3. getZoomForExtent
4. getZoomForResolution

Hit Ctrl-X and mouse over the elements to see the DOM hierarchy. Enter jash.help() for more.

Last week, The Open Planning Project graciously hosted a two day OpenLayers sprint in their New York office. Chris Schmidt and Erik Uzureau (of MetaCarta) came down from Boston, Andreas Hocevar crossed the Atlantic to join us from Austria, I (Tim Schaub) dug my way out of my Northern Rockies bunker, and a few of the TOPP locals joined in from their usual posts.

Our general goal was to get the trunk in shape for the upcoming 2.6 release. In addition, we took advantage of the dedicated time to squeeze in some new features. Andreas continued to work on his excellent style work, adding a new StyleMap class for use with vector layers. Erik pulled an all-nighter conjuring up beautiful popups. I tweaked event handling and Chris closed 372 tickets. Sebastian Benthall (TOPP) contributed numerous fixes from their slick collaborative mapping application, and Tim Coulter (TOPP) put together nice code for customizing vector graphic z-indexing.

The upcoming 2.6 release is looking even more feature rich than the last. Thanks to all who have contributed. Special thanks to Erik for initiating the sprint and to The Open Planning Project for hosting us in style.

OpenLayers 2.5 has been released.

As of this final release, the OpenLayers 2.5 release closes 190 outstanding tickets, more than any other OpenLayers release to date! For this we are indebted to the many members of the community, and especially the hard work of organizations like The Open Planning Project via Tim Schaub and a number of developers like Pierre Giraud, Eric Lemoine, and Fred Junrod of the Camptocamp team, as well as continued support from Chris Schmidt and Erik Uzureau of MetaCarta.

Many thanks to all who have helped make this release so great. Now on to new features! SLD, client side reprojection, improved documentation and examples, tile transitions… so many neat things that 2.6 will hopefully bring.

Based on past experience with releases, it seems like the 2.5 release may be imminent: If we don’t receive any bug reports by the start of the FOSS4G conference on Tuesday, my hope is that the PSC will decide that the time has come to release the software as a final version.

I’m excited about this release, as it represents some major improvements that I think are great: the improved format parsing, the improved feature modification tools, the Spherical Mercator support, etc.

I’m also looking forward to FOSS4G: meeting up with a bunch of the people who have helped create this release and getting started on the next one

OpenLayers 2.5 RC1 has been released:

• Announcement
• Release Notes

Bugs are best now There still might be time to get a release out before the end of FOSS4G…

As of 2.5-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.5 release closes 160 outstanding tickets, 50% more than any OpenLayers release to date. Included in this release is the addition of 3 major format classes, significantly improved feature digitization/editing tools, support for treating commercial datasources as projected for better overlaying with other data, the ability to have tiles wrap around the date line, and additional layer classes.

For this we are indebted to the many members of the community, and especially the hard work of organizations like The Open Planning Project via Tim Schaub and a number of developers like Pierre Giraud, Eric Lemoine, and Fred Junrod of the Camptocamp team, as well as continued support from Chris Schmidt and Erik Uzureau of MetaCarta.

After almost two weeks of work on OpenLayers, 2.5 featureset is finally starting to come together: Although we have 22 tickets open, only 3 lack patches, and only 12 are not ready and waiting for code review. Thanks to Tim Schaub and Erik Uzureau for their tireless efforts on this front.

I think Tim might have wanted to write something on some of these things, but I’m feeling chatty at the moment, so you get to hear from me first

Some of the new features for OpenLayers 2.5:

• Better Vector Format Support, including GeoJSON in its current incarnation and better cross-browser XML parsing support.
• Better Feature Editing — with support for ‘virtual vertices’ a la Google My Maps for extending out a shape and keyboard support for removing vertices from it.
• Spherical Mercator support, to better support overlaying other data on top of commercial data sources. This means that vectors and TileCache over Google Maps baselayers will work.
• Regular Polygon drawing and creation: allowing users to specify a center, radius, and number of sides to create a polygon around an origin.

(Note that the above URLs are likely to change/go away as they move into trunk.)

Already in trunk for this release:

• Combination of gridded/untiled layers to limit code duplication
• NaturalDocs powered documentation: already up and running on the apidocs, this complete rewrite of OpenLayers documentation is a huge step forward.
• Debug support: In numerous places in the code, when a function can’t fail gracefully, it will now report to the user via the Firebug or Firebug Lite console when switched on.
• Rotating Vector Features
• Over 100 other bugfixes and minor changes to the OpenLayers code.

All in all, this release is going to bring together many of the small things that had been left over from the 2.4 release, and I’m looking forward to moving forward with many of the exciting new features.

OpenLayers has more than 2100 automated tests.

I’m doing a presentation of OpenLayers on Tuesday at Where 2.0. I’ll be up for 5 minutes on stage, presenting the best that OpenLayers has to offer.

If you’ve got a demo of OpenLayers — especially one showing customized tools, layers, stuff like that — I’d love to be able to use it in my presentation.

You can drop a link here, or if you’d prefer for your URL to be kept private, you can email me at crschmidt@metacarta.com.

Looking forward to showing people the best OpenLayers has to offer.