Mapbender Report 2007

= Mapbender = Retrieved from http://www.mapbender.org/Annual_report_2007


 * Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
 * Contact name: Christoph Baudson, christoph@osgeo.org

Key Accomplishments
(the top 5-10 key items that the project or PSC accomplished this period)

quality assurance

 * increased the percentage of re-usable code by switching from script-oriented to object-oriented design
 * since 02/07: well-used bug tracking system Trac supplied by OSGeo (163 tickets up to now), supplement of patches for bugs.
 * since 03/07: well-defined release proceedings, releases on a regular basis (at least 4 releases per year)
 * 12/07: optimization of Mapbender's load process: it now loads 4-5 times as fast.
 * since 04/07: growing HTML API of JavaScript and PHP classes, for example https://svn.osgeo.org/mapbender/trunk/documents/jsdoc/index.html
 * 01/07: establishment of coding conventions, see http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/Code_conventions

community building

 * since 03/07: regular, productive weekly IRC meetings, see logs at http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/IRC_Meeting
 * 05/07: development sprint with around 20 participants
 * since 01/07: integration of several new developers outside of the core team (Michael Schulz, Marc Jansen, Marko Samson etc)
 * since 07/07: development of internationalisation techniques (in collaboration with italian developers)
 * multi-language documentation at www.mapbender.org

Areas for Improvement
(any weaknesses in process, software, management, etc. that you plan to address or recognise need some help)


 * enhance international outreach, address more people outside Germany (or Europe)
 * develop an easy-to-use update routine
 * integration of OSGeo software, like OpenLayers
 * despite having an opportunity to host demos at Telascience, a machine with better connection to Europe might be desirable. The server is very slow here.

Opportunities to Help
(list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report)


 * Wiki: Request for an Account and add your web application to the Mapbender Gallery or help on the documentation
 * Contribute your set of buttons to make Mapbender look better
 * Offer service around Mapbender, there is still a lot of commercial potential
 * Join development by throwing code over the fence or joining the core development team. We need people who have fun creating Web 2.0 style interfaces and have a hand for design work
 * Fund core development by sponsoring

Outlook for 2008
(this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2008 :))

Maybe (depending on interest - so ask for it!)
 * release of Mapbender 2.5, featuring i18n, KML support, optimized code etc.
 * stabilise and enhance input/output of standardized formats like WMS, WFS, WMC, GeoJSON, KML
 * continue to work on re-design to allow interoperation with state-of-the-art software
 * WFS FilterEncoding interface - this means that you can query geographic objects for spatial and attribute data
 * SLD Editor
 * Install / Setup script
 * Catalog connectors
 * Enhanced update functionality
 * new interfaces (badly needed, we still look like from the late nineties...)
 * OpenLayers as alternative map interface
 * FeatureServer support
 * Tile cache support