OpenLayers Blog

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.

A user his morning pointed out that the GeoRSS serializer was broken. I forget sometimes that I should be very careful about getting my hopes up about releases until they’re actually totally done: I’ve been looking forward to the 2.4 release for quite a while now, and I always feel frustrated when some other bug means another RC to go through.

Hopefully this RC can go through quickly and we might eventually get 2.4 out…

So, I was playing Super Mario Brothers — the original — last night, and I was on world 7-4. I’ve never been good at the damn maze at the end of that level… so I pulled out the OpenLayers Mario Map, created using TileCache and OpenLayers, and figured out where I needed to go.

I love when I get a chance to use software I’ve helped to write… even if the purpose is slightly tangential to the reason it was written.

Un Mapa de México con OpenLayers y MapServer | hablandodesigs:

Pues he seguido jugando con OpenLayers y he creado un mapa digital de México donde se pueden ver las ortofotos del INEGI, división estatal y municipal. Todo esto en un lapso tal vez de 4 hora contando la instalación de mapserver.

A nice post showing how to set up MapServer on Windows, create a mapfile, and show it in OpenLayers. This is basically the step-by-step, detailed version of the video I made on Mapping Your Data, in Spanish.

OpenLayers supports something called Build Profiles. These allow you to build a single file OpenLayers.js which contains all the code you need and only the code you need.

In order to target a minimal changeset for OpenLayers 2.4, we’ve added an additional profile, ‘full’, which contains the OpenLayers Vector changes. These changes increase the library size by about 25% over the ’standard’ build, and may add more code complexity.

What this means is that in order to use the vector tools, you will need to build a different single file build than you did in the past: instead of just running ‘./build.py’ in the build directory, you will need to run ‘./build.py full’.

The OpenLayers 2.4 distributions ship with a pre-built OpenLayers full build in the root of the release directory. If you want vector support, you shouldn’t need to do anything — but if you’re rolling your own, you can just move forward with the code that you had as of the last release, rather than needing to do full testing on all the vector code.

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the second release candidate of OpenLayers 2.4.

• Click events for popups and controls cleaned up in IE.
• Improvements to Keyboards
• Improvements to Geometry/Renderer/Feature class to move Renderers to be behind the Layer API
• Fix broken Image layer after committing gutter changes
• Layer.Boxes cleanups.
• Protection against double Layer destroys
• Other minor Vector API cleanups.

As of 2.4-RC2, an additional 29 tickets over the 106 tickets closed by the 2.4-RC1 release. This release fixes vector rendering in SVG to fix a number of serious issues.

We invite you to help us test the 2.4 release candidate! To test 2.4 in your applications, include the following tag in your OpenLayers-powered page:

  <script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.4-rc2/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/. Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.4 version and milestone.

We look forward to your feedback!

Regards,

The OpenLayers Team

The OpenLayers Development Team is proud to announce the first release candidate of OpenLayers 2.4. While the public API maintains backwards compatibility with previous 2.x releases, OpenLayers 2.4 introduces a number of internal changes that are important for developers working inside the OpenLayers library, including:

• Support for rendering vectors on the map, using both SVG and VML (finally!)
• Vector Geometry classes
• New UI Handler classes
• New and improved Control classes, including a generic toolbar class
• Substantial enhancements to existing Layer classes, particularly WFS
• A massive effort to track down and eliminate memory leaks of JavaScript objects and DOM nodes
• Better auto-generated class documentation
• Tons and tons of bug fixes!

As of 2.4-RC1, the OpenLayers 2.4 release closes 106 outstanding tickets, more than any other OpenLayers release to date! For this we are indebted to the many members of the community, as listed in our new contributor file, who have put their hard work into improving OpenLayers. Please see the release notes for OpenLayers 2.4 and the list of closed tickets for more details.

We invite you to help us test the 2.4 release candidate! To test 2.4 in your applications, include the following tag in your OpenLayers-powered page:

  <script src="http://openlayers.org/api/2.4-rc1/OpenLayers.js"></script>

As always, the source is available at http://openlayers.org/download/. Bug reports can be filed in Trac, under the 2.4 version and milestone.

We look forward to your feedback!

Regards,

The OpenLayers Team

After a couple hard days with Drip, the IE Memory Leak Detector, OpenLayers no longer leaks any DOM objects when leaving the page.

The end result of this is that OpenLayers is far more efficient in terms of memory usage. This has led to a noticeable improvement in performance in some cases, especially cases with a layer switcher or large numbers of markers.

Thanks to Erik for his help in debugging these leaks, and helping keep me going when I wanted to never see a DOM Leak again!

Recently, a mailing list post on the Dev list asked where we had gotten the awesome Vector Drawing icons from. I’d like to publicly thank CitySafe, and specifically, Ed Dowding, for uploading the icons to the Vector Drawing wiki page many moons ago, and granting their use to the OpenLayers project.