OpenLayers Blog

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.

With OpenLayers growing up, it’s time for it to get its own blog, instead of living off the MetaCarta Labs weblog. So, welcome to the OpenLayers blog!

This is the OpenLayers Blog.