OpenLayers Report 2007
OpenLayers
- Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2007
- Contact name: Chris Schmidt and Erik Uzureau
Key Accomplishments
- Graduated from OSGeo incubation
- Three major releases in 2007
- 2.3: Bugfix release 2.2, improvements in tile handling, added support for TMS
- 2.4: Major release adding vector drawing support, improved event handling framework, many editing controls
- 2.5: Support for more formats: KML, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, additional vectorization tools, better third party api integration, improved developer documentation
- Many many new contributors: 250+ on developers list, 550+ on users list, over 110 users signed up for Trac accounts
- Integration into existing toolkits: MapBuilder now uses OpenLayers for rendering, camptocamp MapFish library does the same
- Many commercial deployments of OpenLayers
Areas for Improvement
- Plan to migrate to OSGeo infratructure for SVN/Trac
- Process to become a committer better defined (add more committers, add reviewer role, etc.)
- Better documentation, better memory handling
- Continue to expand support for existing Geo standards.
Opportunities to Help
- list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report
Outlook for 2008
In 2008, OpenLayers is poised to continue on its current trend of taking geographic information to the web. With support for new geographic formats and servers, improved performance, and web browsers becoming more and more commonly used as the sole client to access datasets, OpenLayers has placed itself in a strong growth position. Patches and contributions are arriving from around the globe, from contributors on 5 different continents.
In 2008, expect to see wider usage of OpenLayers as the project becomes more widely used and better documented. Already, we have seen major governmental organizations take up OpenLayers as the sole public API to their data, preferring the open source project to commercial ventures such as Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft's offerings. With this trend, it is likely that users can expect to see continued usage leading to wider support for different browsers, improved functionality, and more in 2008.